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Research on Lawrence has contributed to the conservation and preservation of a literary heritage of local, national and international significance through award-winning cultural activity in the Nottinghamshire region. School children, community and special interest groups, and a broader public through national and international media activity, have engaged with insights into Lawrence's life and local legacy through exhibitions, outreach and workshops, contributing to a deeper understanding and appreciation of Nottinghamshire's rich cultural heritage and to an improved tourist experience. The discovery of a previously unpublished Lawrence manuscript has served to reinvigorate public interest and debate and to challenge long-held public misconceptions about Lawrence's attitudes towards women.
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.
This study, based on Dr David Evans' work on C19th French poetry, encompasses a wide variety of schools outreach, recordings, concerts, workshops and public talks in Scotland and England, bringing practising musicians, schools and concert audiences together with academics and students, to explore the relationship of words to music, and song as a mode of artistic expression and intercultural exchange. It produced brand new compositions, brought little known works to a wider audience, offered new ways of listening and understanding challenging artworks, and inspired amateur composers to write their own material, based on fresh insights into the theory and practice of major artists.
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.
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.
With a series of three CDs, created by his ensemble The Dowland Project on the ECM label, Dr John Potter succeeded in bringing early vocal music that was formerly the preserve of the `classical' concert hall into the realm of contemporary practice, including jazz. The CDs and the public performances that followed them, influenced the creative practice of leading professional musicians from both sides of the jazz/classical divide, and directly inspired the creation of an innovative digital work by Ambrose Field (Being Dufay), which has itself received international acclaim through CD reviews and public performance in significant venues. Potter's work has played a significant part in the preservation and reinvigoration of musical heritage, while proposing and demonstrating a new creative approach to early music.
This case study demonstrates the application of Joe Bennett's research into strategies for quantifying, observing and analysing creative processes used by songwriters. Impact has been achieved through three researcher-practitioners at the University — Bennett himself, plus Davey Ray Moor and Richard Parfitt. The research has been disseminated outside of academia through the publicly accessible workshops at the UK Songwriting Festival and Burnsong, which have received national media coverage (BBC, Sunday Times) and attracted participants from all over the world. The research has also had an impact in the commercial music industry through Bennett's forensic musicology songwriting consultancy reports, which have been used by music publishers and law courts in the settlement of songwriter copyright disputes. Summaries of the research have been presented to a non-academic music audience via international print publication (Total Guitar Magazine). Practitioners connected with the research (Moor and Parfitt) have achieved top 10 hits and international music publication for non-academic audiences.
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.
The research community that has grown up around the Art of Record Production project is inextricably entwined with the professional and creative communities of record production practitioners and therefore the research permeates the practice and vice versa. The London College of Music (LCM) — University of West London (UWL), is at the heart of both of these communities, with staff immersed in both research and professional practice and is also engaging with the professional recording community through the Audio Engineering Society (AES). The highly vocational nature of the academic subject and the fact that research underpins the pedagogy means that LCM's research has a profound impact on professional practice. This comes from two directions. Firstly, this research has become central to pedagogy on record production in higher education around the world and is thus helping to shape the mind-set of the new wave of professional practitioners who are graduating from these courses. Secondly, the high level of engagement with the Art of Record Production projects by existing professionals, many of whom are now developing dual careers in academia, and their trade organisations means that they are engaging with, and even helping to shape, the research.
Recent work carried out in Cambridge has brought academic research and performance practice into multiple relationships; the impact of this work has been far-reaching and various. On the one hand, research on the origins of polyphony and on nineteenth-century piano music has impacted performance practice and, through this, the experiences and thinking of a broad listening public. Some of this research has enabled performers to revive scores long thought unperformable, while other work has empowered interpreters in ways that would have been unimaginable before the digital age. On the other hand, research that links polyphonic composition and performance practice with scientific thinking has explored the potential of the concert hall as an arena for research, turning music into a vehicle for public engagement with science. In this way, academic research informs and transforms musical performance and listener experience, while the practice of performance informs and transforms the understanding of music.