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 a wide spectrum of musical research, while also addressing some of the important practical challenges research students face.
Each day school consists of three complementary seminars designed to explore the relationships between different approaches to musical research. The London programme will be complemented by the Research Training Reading Group and by one or more regional research training day schools and workshops later in the academic year.
London day schools will usually 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
Registration
The fee for each day school is £20 but this is reduced to £10 per day for IMR Student Associates. To become an IMR Student Associate costs £10 per year.
IMR Student Associates application form
Hardship Fund for travel costs
The IMR has established a Hardship Fund for Research Training In Music London day schools to which students may apply individually for assistance with travel costs, normally up to 50% of the cost of an individual trip. If you wish to apply please email music@sas.ac.uk with relevant details including the approximate cost of attending the day school(s).
TERM 1
24 October
Practicalities of PhD Study: ethics, viva preparation and survival, getting published
Paul Archbold (IMR), with Laudan Nooshin (City), and Rachel Cowgill (Cardiff)
TERM 2
13 February
Music and the Social
Convenor: David Wright (RCM)
The purpose of the ‘Music and the Social’ training day is to show how social history methodologies and ethnographic approaches can be used to advance our understanding of music and its context. The day will focus on the significance of social and economic dimensions in the study of musical life.
The case studies and materials used by the three contributors to today's study day will focus on how societies use music, and on the cultural and economic circumstances in which music has been consumed, thereby broadening our perceptions of music’s significance beyond a given musical text. In other words, they are concerned with the significance of composition, performance and reception as actions and artifacts that take place within, and are framed by, their social contexts.
Leanne Langley considers press materials, concert programmes, pictorial evidence and public records as information sources for a research trail, whether in conventional reception history or revisionist cultural history. She argues that understanding such socially derived material requires knowledge of their authorial and economic background, just as explanatory power for their interpretation requires wider historical argument about continuity and change. She will draw on examples from her studies of reading and listening audiences in Britain, 1780-1930, and from her challenges to received knowledge about music institutions in nineteenth-century Britain.
Tina K. Ramnarine will draw on extensive ethnographic research (particularly on examples from Finland) to examine music in the culturally and economically heterogeneous Baltic Sea Region. She will look at the practices of pelimmanit (folk violinists) alongside the works and discourses of art music composers such as Einojuhani Rautavaara and Pekka Jalkanen. In introducing this ethnographic material, she will discuss the issues facing music researchers who turn to oral histories, interviews and life stories as ways into understanding music in its contemporary social and economic contexts. The discussion will highlight the insights to be gained from human-centred research methods. In considering the connections between folk and art music traditions, she will also revisit one of the most influential theoretical and methodological paradigms in music research - the early twentieth century Finnish geographic-historic method.
David Wright, who has just completed a history of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (the ABRSM), discusses some of the cultural, social and economic factors involved in interpreting the significance of music exams and music examining on British musical culture, and its influence on the position and status of musicians in British society. He will also look at some of the issues facing researchers using private archives. In his case study, he outlines the significance of the Novello business archive (and specifically the company’s Commission Books) as a historical source for nineteenth-century British music. The example of John Stainer shows how the information contained in these Commission Books can be used to give us a very different understanding of composers and the economics of composition at the time from some commonly held perceptions.
10.45–11.10: Assemble/coffee
11.10: Introduction
11.15–11.45: Leanne Langley
11.45–12.15: Tina K. Ramnarine
12.15–12.45: David Wright
12.45–13.45: LUNCH
13.45–14.45: Tina K. Ramnarine
14.45–15.30: David Wright
15.30–16.00: TEA
16.00–17.00: Leanne Langley
17.00–17.30: General discussion and wind-up
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5 March
Music and Philosophy
Convenors: Nanette Nielsen (University of Nottingham), Tomas McAuley (doctoral candidate, King’s College London)
The interaction between philosophy and music is rich and varied: discussions of music have a long-established history of engaging with philosophical issues, while music has often been taken as an object of philosophical investigation. Music has, furthermore, often challenged and shaped philosophical thought. This training day brings together scholars from both musicology and philosophy, each of whom will present recent work contributing to the ongoing discussion between the two disciplines. Providing ample opportunity for dialogue and debate in a group setting, the aim is to inspire ideas, methodologies, and approaches relevant to both music and philosophy. Complementing work undertaken by the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group (RMA MPSG), this day can also be seen as a prelude to the 2nd Annual Conference to be held by the Study Group in July, for which the optional theme is ‘Meaning and Ineffability’.
Prof. Matthew Kieran (University of Leeds)
Composers often encounter writer’s block, a state that can be deeply frustrating and is often associated with depression. However, not all cases of creative inactivity or procrastination are alike. Kieran will explore when, where and why artists may be responsible for such creative inactivity or suffer from it as a result of conditions visited upon them. In doing so we will go on to consider how creative paralysis may result from perfectionism, fear and lack of fortitude. Whilst we should be careful not to confuse causes and effects, and we ought to recognize that cases are invariably complex, there may be good reason to think that writer’s block sometimes manifests creative vices.
Dr Nanette Nielsen (University of Nottingham) will draw on her recent book Music and Ethics (Ashgate, 2012, co-authored with Marcel Cobussen), and explore ways that philosophy can be an aid to musicology in the field of ethical criticism. She will include a critique of Peter Kivy’s recent chapter on ‘Musical Morality’, and contrast it with other recent contributions in this area (McClary, Taruskin, Critchley). She will also consider the possibilities for ethical criticism in relation to the complex philosophical issue of ‘freedom’, looking in particular at musical creativity in 1920s Germany. The focal point for discussion here will be a forthcoming article on Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt auf.
Prof. Max Paddison (Durham University)
One of the big issues in philosophical aesthetics concerns questions of ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’ in art, and in particular in music. When propositional meanings can only be applied to music with great difficulty, if at all, then can we talk of ‘meaning’ in such a context? Drawing on a range of his publications from recent years, including Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), edited with Irène Deliège, and also Musicae Scientiae (issue: Aspects of Time in Creation of Music, 2004), Paddison will put forward a number of proposals for discussion in this paper, with particular reference on the one hand to theorists and philosophers like L. B. Meyer, Roger Scruton, and Peter Kivy, and on the other to Adorno and critical theory.
The three speakers will be joined by Tomas McAuley (doctoral candidate, King’s College London), who will explore some of the challenges facing doctoral researchers in this area. Drawing on his experience as Founding Chair of the RMA MPSG, he will examine how involvement in such research networks can both assist and complicate doctoral study. Presenting a snapshot of his own research, he will investigate some of the ways in which philosophy has impacted historically on musical thought. His focus will be on the birth, in the late eighteenth century, of a new view of music according to which music can provide non-linguistic knowledge. Musicologists have explored in depth the possible sources of this new view of music in contemporary music and in contemporary philosophical conceptions of art. McAuley will supplement and question this rich literature by examining the role of contemporary philosophy unconcerned even with art in general.
Schedule
10.45–11.10: Assemble/coffee
11.10: Introduction TM/NN
Music and Philosophy: four challenges
11.15–11.45: NN On the ethics of discourse about music
11.45–12.15: MK On character and creativity
12.15–12.45: MP On problems of meaning and truth in music: Adorno and others
12.45-13.15: TM On music history without music
13.15-14.15: LUNCH BREAK
Case studies
14.15–14.45: MK
14.45–15.15: MP
15.15-15.45 Tea
15.45-16. 15 NN
16.15-16.45: TM
16.45-17.30: General discussion and windup. (This will include advice on career avenues/job prospects, publication opportunities, and other practicalities.)
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19 March
Music and Gender
IMR Study Day, Music and Gender
Speakers: Anna Morcom (Royal Holloway, University of London), Shrz Ee Tan (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Rowan Pease (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)
Coffee/tea from 10.30
10.45 - 11.15 am Welcome and convenor's introduction
11.15 - 12.30 Seminar 1, Rowan Pease, ‘Researching K-pop fans in China: gender, sexuality and nation’
12.30 - 13.30 Lunch break
13.30 – 14.45 Seminar 2, Anna Morcom, ‘Dance, gender and desire: erotic and transgender performers in India’
14.45 - 15.00 Coffee/tea break
15.00 – 16.15 Seminar 3, Shzr Ee Tan, ‘Theory, Practice and Fieldwork in working musical queer communities’
16.15 – 17.00 General discussion and close
Rowan Pease, ‘Researching K-pop fans in China: gender, sexuality and nation’
In this session I discuss my research into young female fans of Korean wave (Hanliu) pop in China. The fans, a self-proclaimed tribe, feminise and infantilise the male stars that they so loudly adore, seemingly overturning the star-fan gender roles. For example, on websites emasculated idols may be portrayed as innocents vulnerable to the evils of capitalism, in romantic homosexual relationships, or as frolicking, wide-eyed babies. The Korean entertainment industry has adapted and profited from their tastes, seemingly catering to fan’s desires for ‘soft’ masculinity.
My research led me to reassess whether Western norms of gender should be mapped onto contemporary East Asian culture, and the degree to which scholarship on fandom in the US and UK could help in reaching an understanding of the K-wave fans. I will also briefly explore the difficulties and ethics of discussing deeply personal feelings and convictions across cultural and generational boundaries.
Sound is often absent in the Korea-wave fans’ discourse on the stars, beyond bland statements such as ‘he sings well,’ ‘their music is great.’ During this session, we will discuss ways that these male idols are performing their gender vocally, for instance, through timbre, volume and pitch range.
Anna Morcom, ‘Dance, gender and desire: erotic and transgender performers in India’
Before modern reforms, no married or marriageable woman could perform professionally in public or in front of men. Hence females who performed in front of men were of the courtesan type, belonging to matrilineal communities that existed outside of marriage. Alternatively, boys and men performed female roles as female impersonators. Amongst this group, many are transgender or effeminate, known in North India as kothi or zanana. They form close equivalents to courtesan-type performers, and can be distinguished from the hijras, India’s well-known transgender community. All such female, public, erotic performers are low in status in comparison to their patrons.
Through this case study, I explore questions of power and interaction of gender, status, social space, performance, sexuality and desire. I focus on the embodied nature of performance, its power of affect, and structuralist and poststructuralist models of gender. I explore the pre-modern paradigm of the public, female, erotic performer, and also look at how changes brought by modernity have radically affected the status and the artistic and sexual labour of these performers. In particular, I look at their increasing marginality and transformation into commercial sex workers.
Shzr Ee Tan, ‘Theory, Practice and Fieldwork in working musical queer communities’
This seminar explores the practical sensitivities of reconciling Judith Butler’s stance on the fluidity of gender as a socially-performed construct, with the highly-charged politics of “coming out” among queer musical communities. Part of the apparent conflict lies in how queer composers, performers and music fans grapple with the anti-identity politics of socio-musical labelling, while continuing to deal with a long history of the old “nature” vs “nurture” dualism and also exploring the socio-economic relationship of homosexuality to the performing arts. Significantly different field encounters in two separate case studies provide templates for examining gender issues.
First, queer a cappella singers in Singapore use the genre in complex – sometimes subversive – fashion, to perform queer identity while publicly resisting the ‘gay’ label. This may be because of the fear of official censure, but also due to an unclarified personal identification of sexual orientation. Music thus provides a notionally gender-unmarked performative arena, allowing for the camouflaging and exploration of gender identity. Second, I examine queer fans in the Chinese diaspora who rely on (largely female) musical icons/ divas as agents of emotional and sexual ventriloquism in choosing how to engage with the politics of “coming out.” Reflexive musings on respectively negative and positive reactions to my initial attempts to conduct field research among members of the above communities will hopefully contribute to ongoing discussion on methodological issues relating to gender research. I examine the exercise of cultural sensitivity while conducting fieldwork in taboo-ridden contexts and in regions where homosexual acts remain illegal, and also where hardline stances emerging from gender-equality campaigns bring up further socio-political confrontations.
