Composition and Performance of Contemporary Music

Processes in Music Making Research Group (PiMMReG)

Dr Stephen Downes
E: s.downes@surrey.ac.uk
www.surrey.ac.uk/msr/research/composition

This Research Group has been set up to conduct practice-led research exploring the nature and practice of collaborative processes in music making, including work across the related areas of improvisation, performance practice, and the role and function of intuition, dialogue, and critical reflection. It is a cross-tradition initiative that recognises and incorporates the richness and complexities of how particular traditions (such as post-atonal, experimental, free and/or idiomatic improvisation, post-vernacular) relate to, describe and understand these issues. An additional and necessary element is the development of appropriate methodologies designed to explore and include practice, its processual qualities and forms of embodied knowledge, and which are sensitive to the intuitive and improvisatory dimensions of arts practice.

Work in contemporary composition and performance also takes place outside the confines of this Research Group.

Modernist Aesthetics and Musicology

Dr Stephen Downes
E: s.downes@surrey.ac.uk
www.surrey.ac.uk/msr/research/modernist

In musicology we are principally interested in the relationships between musical texts and their contexts, within a repertoire from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on modernism in Central and Eastern Europe, on British music, on popular music, and on jazz and film music. Analysis informs all the musicological work of the Department, but the methods and aims of this work are diverse. Hermeneutics is also a key concern, both in relation to semiotics and to other interpretive schemas.

Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR)

Dr Tim Brookes
E: t.brookes@surrey.ac.uk
www.surrey.ac.uk/soundrec

Since its creation in 1998, the Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR) has become known internationally as a leading centre for research in psychoacoustic engineering, with world-class facilities and with significant funding from research councils (in particular EPSRC) and from the industry (we have successfully completed projects in collaboration with Adrian James Acoustics, Bang & Olufsen, BBC R&D, Genelec, Harman-Becker, Institut für Rundfunktechnik, Meridian Audio, Nokia, Pharos Communications and Sony BPE). Additionally, the IoSR was a founding partner in the EPSRC-funded Digital Music Research Network (DMRN) and in the Spatial Audio Creative Engineering Network (SpACE-Net).