Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, London (Room ST273)
Mondays, 10.30 am - 5.30 pm
This national scheme, originally set up with AHRC funding and now run by the IMR, is aimed at PhD students but is also open to those taking Master's programmes. Specialist tutors from across the UK provide an insight into current research questions, debates and methodologies across an exceptionally wide spectrum of musical research, while also addressing some of the important practical challenges research students face.
New for 2009/10
For 2009/10 we have reconfigured the London RTM programme as a series of free day schools, each consisting of three complementary seminars designed to explore the relationships between different approaches to musical research. Each day will follow the same timetable:
Coffee/tea from 10.30
10.45 - 11.15 am Welcome and convenor’s introduction
11.15 - 12.45 Seminar 1
12.45 - 13.45 Lunch break
13.45 - 15.15 Seminar 2
15.15 - 15.30 Coffee/tea break
15.30 - 17.00 Seminar 3
17.00 - 17.30 General discussion and close
The London programme will be complemented by a series of regional research training days starting in 2010 to replace the IMR’s ‘roadshow’ series.
Registration form: Please note that places are limited and a waiting list will be operated.
For the London Series travel subsidies are offered to assist postgraduate students who are resident outside Greater London during term-time to attend these day schools. Maximum reimbursement will be at saver fare rates: the proportion of costs refunded will depend on the number of claimants.
TERM 1
19 October
Practicalities of PhD Study: ethics, planning, funding, viva to publication
Convenor: John Irving (IMR), with Rachel Cowgill (Liverpool Hope) and Laudan Nooshin (City)
Laudan Nooshin: 'What do you think you¹re doing?' Research Ethics and the Music PhD Student
Most doctoral students in music embark on research out of a love for the subject and because they have a special interest in a particular area.
However, whilst there has been an increased awareness of ethical issues in recent years, relatively few stop to consider such issues in relation to their research. But ethical issues confront us all, particularly - but not only - those working with living ‘subjects’: musicians and others involved in music-making. Starting with a number of case studies, this session will encourage students to think about some of the issues which arise around questions of representation (who has the power to represent whom?), ownership (who does the music belong to anyway?) and appropriation (who has the power/right to do what with it?). Many of these questions relate to issues of power and whose voice becomes privileged in the research process.
What responsibility, if any, do we as scholars have towards those we write about and their music?
John Irving: Approaching the PhD viva
A terrifying prospect? A doddle? Perhaps neither of those two extremes is true for most of us. But how do you handle this situation? What are examiners trying to test in this strange meeting? How might you prepare suitably for it? How do you give a good account of yourself and your work? This session will look at these and other issues and will aim to include an opportunity for some interactive viva preparation in a low pressure environment!
Rachel Cowgill: Reaching Your Public: From Viva to Publication
When, what, and where to publish after the PhD is an important decision to make. What makes a good article? How do you go about securing a book contract? How do peer-review processes work? And what are publishers and editors looking for in new work? This session explores what's involved and highlights some of the factors to consider in getting your work out to the right readership.
2 November
Music as Social Phenomenon: social history, social psychology, ethnography
Convenor: David Wright (RCM), with Susan Hallam (Institute of Education) and Richard Widdess (SOAS)
This Research Training Day will consider some of the social perspectives that can be used to open up a more contextual understanding of music, thereby enriching our means of representing, investigating and discussing it. Asking why people play or write the music they do in relation to their particular cultural, social and economic contexts, informs us about the patterns and nature of the consumption, provision and value of music in their societies. In ‘A disjunction of histories’, David Wright suggests instances where taking close account of music’s social and economic circumstances prompt interpretations that vary considerably from the often monolithic representations and attitudes of ‘musicological’ history. Exploring social psychological perspectives on research in music, Susan Hallam’s ‘What can social psychology contribute to our understanding of music?’ outlines the key research topics and their current status. She focuses on the nature of the methodologies which are adopted in such research, discussing their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the issues that arise in designing sociological and social psychological studies and in analysing the data derived from them. Richard Widdess looks at ethnographic approaches in ‘The social side of music, the musical side of society: some South Asian examples’. He reflects on aspects of his research on South Asian music with reference to a lineage of classical musicians in North India and a farming community in Nepal. Until the late 1970’s, it was commonly assumed that the ‘classical’ music of India was an autonomous musical system while the ‘folk’ music of the region was primarily a social phenomenon. This dichotomy was largely an artefact of the methodologies of those who wrote about these kinds of music. The publication of Daniel Neuman’s anthropological studies of North Indian classical music, and Edward Henry’s ethnographic studies of music in North Indian villages, showed how all music could be illuminated by being studied as a form of social behaviour, and how one might read music as social and society as musical, in South Asia as in other areas where ethnomusicologists had been developing similar approaches.
16 November
Scores: analysis in context and practice, digital and non-digital editing, palaeography
Convenor: John Rink (Cambridge), with Robert Pascall (Nottingham) and Paul Vetch (KCL)
This Research Training Day School will focus on musical scores from three different perspectives: analytical, philological, and digital. The first two sessions will be delivered collaboratively by John Rink and Robert Pascall, whereas the final session will be presented by Paul Vetch. Each session will be followed by group discussion.
Analysis in Context and Practice
Session 1 will begin by surveying the discipline of music analysis as practised in the last few decades. The need for a more inclusive analytical discourse will be noted, likewise for a conception of structure that takes into account the process of music as understood by composers, performers and listeners alike. Two different types of performance-related analysis - prescriptive and descriptive - will be outlined, and the particular merits and potential problems associated with each will be set out. The session will end with consideration of how a traditional understanding of the score as musical 'object' can be complemented and/or transcended by a more 'dynamic' approach to musical structure and music analysis in general.
Palaeography for the 21st Century
Robert Pascall proposes seven maxims for a postmodern palaeographical and editorial practice, and exemplifies this practice with selected cruxes from his recent and current work on the Brahms symphonies for the new Brahms Complete Edition. Reference will also be made by John Rink to The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition and to the complex source issues that editors of Chopin’s music must confront. Any musical source is a trace of human intentions, actions and processes, using specific notational habits and conventions. Given our distance from participants in the development and dissemination of a text, how close can we get to a good, serviceable understanding and assessment of the quality of a source, of its inherent ambiguities, its deficiencies and strengths, its role in the processes of realising and communicating a musical work? The presentations will demonstrate how some of these issues play out in a fine-grained practice, showing the kinds of techniques, judgements and interpretations which enable a serious historical/critical edition today.
Digital Archives, Digital Editing
Creating the interface to a digital edition is in many ways proximate to traditional editorial practice in that the interface mediates and to some extent determines the information that the user/reader will have access to. The key difference between print and digital editions lies in the fact that the latter have the potential, at least, to be mutable: if well designed, then digital editions can be highly responsive to the different needs of different users and increasingly will seek to engage active participation from their academic (and general) audiences. This session will discuss the role of digital technologies in enhancing access to complex musicological materials, and it will also explore the processes involved in designing and conceptualising large digital archives and editions. Examples will be drawn from a number of projects developed at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London, including two which focus on the Chopin sources in particular.
References
TERM 2
1 February
Music, Narrative, Image: film semiotics, intertextuality, readings of images and literature
Convenor: Julie Brown (RHUL), with Robert Samuels (Open) and Suzanne Fagence (Victoria & Albert Museum)
This Research Training Day will consider some of the ways in which images interact with music.
Suzanne Fagence Cooper (Victoria & Albert Museum) will consider music’s impact on the visual arts. Why do artists paint music? What extra dimension does it add to their work? Using a range of media - from book illustration to stained glass - this session will look at a number of case studies, to explore the inter-relationship between music and image.
Robert Samuels (Open University) will consider how music, considered as a semiotic system, can come to have the power to create narrative. What in music are the equivalent of words in a language? If narrative is a complex effect created through the articulation of many words together, are equivalent effects possible in music? Some recent research in music and narrativity will be considered as responses to these and related questions.
Julie Brown (RHUL) considers the relationship between music and moving images. How does music function in film? Does it hold the same relationship to the moving images in all types of film? Is it the same in television and other moving image media? What about silent film? This session considers some of the key theories for understanding these relationships, and brings issues into focus through a series of examples and case studies.
15 February
Composers and Performers: practice as research, collaborative research, new notations
Convenor: Neil Heyde (RAM), with Paul Archbold (Kingston), Christopher Redgate (Independent), Roger Redgate (Goldsmiths), and David Ryan (Chelsea College of Art & Design)
Session One – Expanding Instrumental Possibilities
Paul Archbold (Kingston) and Christopher Redgate (AHRC Fellow, RAM)
How can we document a process of discovery? This session explores the role of instrumental manuals in the context of a repertoire survey geared to the identification of innovative work. The roles of improvisation as a research tool and of electronics in enlarging the sphere of performance are considered alongside a range of specific approaches to documentation, focusing on recordings, filming and interviews.
Session Two – Musical Notation
Roger Redgate (Goldsmiths) and David Ryan (Chelsea College of Art and Design)
Music notation can, of course, never be entirely passive as an agent of communication, but it became a compositional issue of especial concern in the mid-20th century. This session investigates some of the implications – for the composer, performer and musicologist – of the particular rewritings of the contract between composer and performer raised by the aesthetics, styles and technical practices found in these compositional territories, and assesses their impact for both practitioners and scholars today.
Session Three – Acts and Texts
Neil Heyde (RAM – convenor)
How can we develop models for drawing on texts (sketches, editions, recordings) to allow us to explore the fluid chain of response central to musical practices of both the present and the past? This session aims to outline some key approaches that reveal contingencies in musical texts and strategies for exploring their ramifications.
1 March
Witnesses: oral history, data through discussion, reception history
Convenor: Jonathan Stock (Sheffield), with Stephanie Pitts (Sheffield) and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge)
Seminar 1: Reception History (Ben Walton)
Seminar 2: Oral History (Jonathan Stock)
Seminar 3: Eliciting Data Through Discussion (Stephanie Pitts)
Music is a very widely discussed topic in our everyday lives. People very often enjoy the process of discussing music with others, and, through doing so, they put forward arguments that reveal not only their musical insights but also aspects of their wider social outlook. Traces of such discussions live on in music criticism, fanzines and blogs, to mention but three written sources, and they also shape the memories and opinions of those whom music scholars question about music. This Day School focuses on the interrelated skills of systematically gathering and critically assessing such data from the public at large, past and present.
A range of written and online sources are considered in Seminar 1, which looks at instances of the reception of music in both historical and contemporaneous settings. Practical advice will be offered to students as to how to locate such materials, what to make of them, and how to integrate their inferences with those generated through other modes of musicological analysis. Seminar 2 looks at oral history. Students will be introduced to approaches to interviewing musicians (and others). Issues of value, narrative, memory (and false memory) will be exemplified, as well as the more practical matters of recording and utilising such materials. Seminar 3 considers the researcher’s responsibilities in eliciting data through discussion, covering interview and focus group techniques as well as the “virtual discussion” of online or written responses to open-ended questions. Data collection and analysis methods, including software, will be demonstrated, and the role of “witnesses” in empirical research will be discussed in relation to seminar participants’ own research fields.
15 March
Sounds: performance studies, analysis of recordings, popular music in performance
Convenor: Tim Hughes (Surrey), with Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (KCL) and Elaine King (Hull)
Analysis of recordings (Daniel Leech-Wilkinson): The ways in which recordings are not faithful carriers of performances will be discussed. Approaches to analysing recordings using pencil and paper will be touched on, but the bulk of the session will look at the use of software tools for gaining detailed information about the sounds performers use in order to make music. Examples will include the interrelation of loudness and rubato in piano playing, early recorded flute tone and vibrato, expressivity in song, and string quartet intonation.
Live Performance Analysis (Elaine King): This seminar will focus on key considerations for researchers in the analysis of live performance, including empirical procedures for observing and studying both the performer and the performance environment (such as the venue, the audience, the acoustic and the type of event). Discussion will focus on methods for documenting the sound, observing the performers’ body movements and gestures, and evaluating the experiences of the performer (and audience). Existing research in the fields of music psychology, music education and performance studies will be discussed in order to draw attention to the variety of approaches used in previous studies as well as the scope of such work. The possibilities for tracking the development of a performer from rehearsal to concert will also be touched upon in order to highlight the importance of studying performance as an evolving art.
