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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.
Birmingham Conservatoire has established a leading reputation in the UK and Europe for the composition and dissemination of new music outside of concert hall conventions, including: site-specific work; concept pieces; contesting genre boundaries; and re-framing the relationship between composition, performer and audience. Through their award-winning compositions and performances, notably for the Cultural Olympiad, the Conservatoire's composers have played a key role in changing understanding of the experiences that new music affords (wit, entertainment, spectacle, theatre, surprise), and in effecting public discourse through media coverage, audience reach, participation and audience co-creation. Their influence on curricula of other HEIs has similarly expanded through an Erasmus programme with nine other European bodies.
The University of Oxford is a leading centre for research in opera and music theatre, where the work of musicologists and practitioners intersects to mutual benefit, and outputs have attracted the wide attention of new audiences well beyond the academic community. Oxford Opera encompasses a broad historical range, but shares a set of common aims and objectives: exploring new and historical modes of performance and realisation; challenging received operatic conventions and performance traditions in a scholarly and creative manner; and disseminating research results to new listeners through professional collaborations. Young people, the general public, and other professional practitioners have all been beneficiaries.
Dibble's research on Britain and Ireland's neglected Victorian and Edwardian composers, particularly Hubert Parry (1848-1918), Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) and John Stainer (1840-1901), together with his public engagement and media work, has had a considerable influence on British musical culture. As a result of Dibble's research there has been a substantial increase in the performance, programming and recording of works by these composers, leading to enhanced awareness, enjoyment and understanding of this repertory and its importance to the nation's musical heritage. This research has also led to increased public access to archival documents related to this music, brought work to orchestras and choirs and contributed to the sales generated by music, CD and DVD publishers.
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:
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:
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.
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 20th 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.
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.
Music reflects and frequently empowers its listeners. Freedom of artistic expression is a right enshrined in international conventions which is under threat in many countries across the world. Research undertaken at the University of Glasgow (UoG) by Martin Cloonan in the censorship, regulation and legislation of music has informed and had a direct impact on a number of different anti-censorship campaigns at both national and international levels. In the UK his work has informed policy changes, specifically in relation to the licensing of smaller live venues; and, internationally his expertise has supported the establishment of key bodies such as Freemuse, the World Forum on Music and Censorship, which lobbies against the imprisonment and censorship of musicians.