Music
Modernist Aesthetics and Musicology
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 and foci on modernism in Central and Eastern Europe, British music, popular music, jazz and film music.
Analysis informs all the musicological work of the department, but the methods and aims of this work are diverse. The analytical methodologies of our musicologists are outlined below.
Professor Stephen Downes’s work on a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth-century music attempts a methodological synthesis of analysis of musical structure with hermeneutics, history and aesthetics. Through this synthesis the aim is to understand the structures and meanings of topics such as eroticism and decadence within the romantic and modernist style and aesthetic.
Dr Jeremy Barham's approach is also interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on theories of modelling (for example, the translation of philosophical constructs into musical process), intertextuality, and meaning and cultural signification (through critical methods or paradigms such as 'metaphor'). His work also engages theories of narrative and temporal forms (for example, image-sound relations), as well as aesthetics and the nature and structures of interdisciplinarity itself.
Professor Allan Moore's object-centred (as distinct from theory-centred) work on popular music treats analysis as the interrogation of a heard text. He is interested in analysis as means rather than end (as part of the process of interpretation), and in the operation of analysis at distinct levels (style, idiolect, performance).
Dr Christopher Mark’s approach is essentially pragmatic: analysis is employed as tool to serve studies of stylistic evolution and expressive meaning, and provides the means to understand compositional languages and decisions within individual works. This approach is currently being applied in major studies of the music of Benjamin Britten, Roger Smalley, and the topic of melancholy in twentieth-century English music.
Dr Tim Hughes’ work in popular music includes the analysis of repetition, timbre, form, and other important but under-explored elements of music.
Two broad areas can be identified within this research; modernist aesthetics, and popular music and film.
Modernist Aesthetics
The department’s research engages with modernism’s characteristic preoccupations, with the aesthetic categories of fragment, originality, desire and subjective identity, the sublime, and the melancholic. It is also focused on modernist obsessions with the new, with conflicts of order and chaos, and subjective anxieties in an age of political upheaval, technological advance and cultural crisis. This research engages with and develops methods in historical and critical musicology and music analysis. In many areas the research in the department also applies an interdisciplinary approach, drawing, for example, upon hermeneutics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and cultural theory.
Dr Stephen Downes has written five monographs – two on Karol Szymanowski (1994, 2003), a study of music and eroticism (2006), a book on decadence in Central and Eastern European modernism (2010), and a study of Hans Werne Henze’s Tristan (2010). He is currently working on a book on Mahler’s influence for CUP, a collections of essays on the avant-garde, and a companion to the music of Szymanowski. He has supervised research students working on the Orpheus myth in early twentieth century music, the music of Ethel Smyth, Greek nationalism, and death scenes in Janácek and Puccini operas. Dr Downes's research has been supported by several grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy .
Dr Jeremy Barham is established as a world-leading Mahler scholar. He has undertaken research-funded by the British Academy-in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Philadelphia, and the focus of his work lies in Mahler's engagement with culture: philosophies of Romanticism (Schopenhauer, Fechner, late idealism) and Modernism (Nietzsche, Adorno), ethnic identity and notions of the self in the early 20th century, and structures of meaning and interdisciplinarity (metaphor, and, most recently, 'cinematic' modes of construction in Mahler). Dr Barham has further research interests in narrative and temporality in music and film media, and issues of intertextuality and appropriation in film music. His publications include a chapter on Mahler's early compositions in OUP's The Mahler Companion (rev. edn, 2002), a volume of Mahler studies for Ashgate, Perspectives on Gustav Mahler (2005), CUP's Companion to Mahler, (2007), a chapter on The Shining’ in Terror Tracks. Music, Sound and Horror Cinema (Equinox Press, forthcoming 2008) and numerous reviews for Music & Letters. He is currently working on monographs on Mahler, culture and musical meaning, and on music, time and the moving image. He has supervised students researching in the fields of late 19th-century performance studies, the musicalization of fiction in Virginia Woolf, and Busoni’s transcriptions.
Dr Christopher Mark's research into English music of the twentieth century includes work leading towards a major publication on melancholy. Within the aesthetics of the early twentieth century this engages with the pastoral, the idyllic, and nostalgia in the music of Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Warlock, and Bridge. Dr Mark's research has been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy.
Popular Music and Film Studies
Although these are fairly new areas of study within musicology in general, they are intrinsic to the research profile of the department. Our work makes use of both analytical and semiotic approaches, aimed at understanding better how musical details contribute to the effects they produce.
Professor Allan Moore's work has developed theories in a number of discreet domains. For instance, in the field of harmony and form, he has developed a modal harmonic taxonomy which enables sequences to be discussed and compared with only limited reference to the major/minor system of classical tonality. In the field of reception, he has developed a theory of rock authenticity which switches the focus from whether a particular music is conceived authentically, towards asking who it authenticates, and on what grounds. In the same field, he has made contributions to an understanding of how style operates as a conceptual tool, particularly but not exclusively within popular music. In the field of production and texture, he has developed models of textual stratification, sonic location within the stereo field (called the 'sound-box') and the use of the voice. All these enable analysis not only to ask what the music consists of, but also to take into account how the music actually sounds. The majority of his subsequent work uses these methods in order to address how specific examples of popular music signify. This is demonstrated in a range of books addressing songs in detail (the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, Jethro Tull's Aqualung) and in general (Rock: The Primary Text), articles, book chapters, and radio appearances. He is currently working on the identity of 'Celtic' music, on the function of accompaniments, and on a history of popular music style.
Dr Jeremy Barham is working particularly in film music, on a range of issues including narrative and temporality (the relationship between film structure and music structure); theories of intertextuality and interpretation; genre-specific work on sci-fi and horror films; and archival work in early sound film.
Dr Tim Hughes' research in popular music is broad ranging. It includes live musical performance; analysis of repetition, timbre, form, and other important but under-explored elements of music; transcription; the use of the studio as a compositional tool; the music of his home region, South Texas; and the history of recorded sound and its effect on our musical traditions. As a multimedia editor for Experience Music Project, he developed numerous audio, multimedia, and internet exhibits and films on the music of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin, and the history of recorded sound. In his Ph.D. dissertation, Groove and Flow: Six Analytical Essays on the Music of Stevie Wonder, he developed a new methodology for analyzing repetition and grooves in popular music. His most recent publications are a chapter on a live performance by Nirvana for Performance And Popular Music: History, Place And Time, edited by Ian Ingliss (Ashgate 2006) and a series of feature boxes for John Covach’s textbook What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History (Norton, 2006).
Symphonova
The Symphonova is the world’s first digital orchestra that plays in response to the gestures of a human conductor.
The Symphonova project reinforces and supports the link between conductor, performer and audience, and in doing so supports live music.
To do this the project is involved in a number of research areas, including gestural control, musical expression in performance, loudspeaker technology, the development of the first functional terminology for conducting, and the psychological and sociological impact of music on human welfare and cohesion. These disparate areas come together to inform the Symphonova digital orchestra.
By supporting musicians, conductors and whole orchestras, in practice and performance, the Symphonova frees conductors, individual musicians and whole ensembles to perform more creatively, allowing them to explore their full musical imagination. And by allowing musicians and orchestras more creative freedom to experiment and innovate, the Symphonova helps orchestras to push the boundaries of what is considered possible in orchestral performance.
The Symphonova can be used as:
A training environment for conductors. As a virtual orchestra, the Symphonova is accurate, tireless and unfailingly responsive. It allows conductors to practice and develop their skills in a supportive non-judgmental environment.
The Symphonova can play works of any degree of complexity, to match a developing conductor’s levels of skill and confidence. Because the Symphonova will be both unfailingly accurate and totally responsive, it will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a conductor’s technique, giving them an informed base on which to develop their skill.
A powerful teaching tool, giving students or professional musicians the opportunity to play and practice ensemble music with which they are unfamiliar, or new interpretations of scores they know well. The Symphonova’s virtual musicians can be tuned to support a single musician or an entire orchestra, filling in absent or weaker areas, and providing a musical framework, in which human musicians are freed to relax and experiment.
A demonstration instrument, which conductors can use to show orchestras how they would like a piece to be approached.
A tool for orchestras to extend their reach and presence into communities with music and performances that has never been possible before.
A tool for social cohesion and welfare bringing together individuals of all ages and from all parts of society to engage in a non-competitive, non-verbal and individually tailored activity.
The Symphonova Project is directed by Dr Shelley Katz.
