Summary of the impact

This case study describes the impact of the on-going practice-based research undertaken by Matthew Fairclough, started in 2003, into new ways of working with percussion and electronics. It has resulted in wide ranging cultural and economic benefits, including impact on individuals and organisations in the private sector. More specifically, the research has resulted in:

• Enhancement to the career, profile and creative practice of a percussionist
• Opportunities for the creative outputs and development of a visual artist
• Exposure, sales and product feedback for an instrument manufacturer
• Performance, creative and career development opportunities for other composers
• Public understanding and appreciation of new music and performance techniques through concerts in public venues outside the Higher Education sector, and through workshops, recordings, broadcasts and digital downloads

Summary of the impact

`Anya 17 is not just an opera. It's a campaign' (cast member's blog, http://tinyurl.com/ne64uqt).

Anya 17 (an opera about human trafficking), first performed in March 2012, generated wide media and civil society attention. 13 UK and international anti-trafficking campaigning groups have endorsed the opera and used it to raise awareness and help leverage their agenda to change legislation. Third sector and media attention has taken the research to a wider community than just the original audience, winning recognition and enabling follow-through of various kinds. Collaboration, publicity and support from NGOs has enabled Anya17 to further its reach internationally, with performances in Romania, Germany, the UK and the USA in the near future creating opportunities for developing further impacts on opera audiences, campaigning organisations, wider civil society and government in Europe and America.

Summary of the impact

The brass band sector embodies a unique cultural, community and industrial history, and the sector continues to thrive. University of Salford researchers have informed this development, demonstrating the following impact:

• Supporting the development of brass band cultures internationally, from the UK to the US, from Scandinavia to Australia, developing opportunities for amateur musicians to participate in professional standard and creatively challenging music-making;
• Promoting inclusion and personal and community aspiration:
• Enhancing the repertoire of brass bands by bringing contemporary "concert hall" techniques to amateur music making, setting competition standards to which brass bands aspire, and:
• Supporting practitioners to assume world leading roles in the field and integrate new research methods into their creative practice;
• Bringing associated economic benefit to the industries which support the movement and the communities which practice.

Summary of the impact

Impact consists in engaging with faith communities, performers and arts bodies, academe, consumers and wider society to contribute to public understanding or perception of how art informs, interrogates, and nurtures spiritual awareness in a secular age; and in developing / enhancing insight into specific musical repertoire and its contextual place in the 20^th or 21st century. Its focus is both critical interrogation of the creation and reception of music with a sacred or spiritual intent, and actual addition to the existing corpus of such compositional work.

Summary of the impact

Since 2006 Professor Christopher Fox has been engaged in a series of linked projects which explore ways in which the engagement of performers and listeners in texted music for vocal ensemble can be enhanced. The research was initially based on received understandings of the perceptible relationship between music and text but, as the project and its impact have developed, the research has extended into a collaborative scientific study of this relationship, funded by two successive awards from the Wellcome Trust. Each stage of the research has been extensively disseminated through public performance, broadcast, recording, print and on-line media and the impact of the research now reaches into a wide range of communities of interest and the general public.

Summary of the impact

Julian Johnson's work on the contemporary status and meaning of Viennese musical modernism and its relation to ideas of social modernity has had impact well beyond academia. Through broadcasts, public lectures, consultancies, essays, programme notes and web-based documentaries for international music festivals he has shaped the presentation of Mahler's music, and that of his contemporaries, for the general public. These activities, undertaken with institutions such as the BBC, the South Bank Centre, the Philharmonia Orchestra and Glyndebourne Opera, have made a long-standing, substantial and far-reaching contribution to public discourse around this repertoire, and to its heightened appreciation.

Summary of the impact

Works written by RNCM composers, performances and commercial recordings of new music by the world-renowned RNCM Wind Orchestra and its staff conductors, advocacy and leadership in UK and world-wide organisations, and copious educational spin-offs from research, have, over the past 20 years, made significant impacts on the development of both the quality and innovative practices in the huge international wind orchestra movement. New compositions in particular, have contributed to a notable re-invigoration of creative practice, inspiring successive generations of musicians to engage with demanding contemporary music in what has traditionally been an artistically conservative medium. RNCM composers have also introduced the wind orchestra into new genre areas including the jazz concerto and oratorio.

Summary of the impact

The impact described below relates to practice-based research conducted in proximity to and in association with a diverse range of public institutions and communities. The case for impact resides in part on the methodological proximity of the work to key sites of social utility and benefit. The deployment of 'participation' as a research methodology and the benefit accruing thereby to participating individuals and agencies in the scientific, penal, religious, arts, healthcare and educational sectors offers a ready conduit for the dissemination of knowledge and the generation of impact. The claimed impact informs the content and direction of (i) music education practice & curricula (ii) arts organisation policy (iii) discursivity within and between cognate disciplines (iv) musicological exegesis and (v) audience engagement.

Summary of the impact

Peter Sheppard Skaerved's research focuses on the ways in which interrelations between composers, performers, instruments and their makers, and music-related artefacts can bring new insights to musical creativity. As a violinist, curator, public speaker and author, Sheppard Skaerved communicates this research to the public through his passionate engagement with performance traditions, new music, and the cultural contexts for music making in the West. His collaborative projects with leading museums in the UK, Europe and the USA have led to enhanced public awareness and understanding of the complexity and diversity of musical creativity.

Summary of the impact

The impact claimed in this statement comes from the composition and performance history of Fantasias by Julian Anderson, a major work for large orchestra composed in 2009. Three key spheres of impact are noted: first, improving the technical and expressive abilities of seasoned and young professional musicians through the preparation and performance of a challenging piece of contemporary music; secondly, drawing a wider audience than that which normally listens to uncompromising contemporary music; and lastly, supporting young composers by the involvement of Fantasias' composer in various bodies concerned with new music.