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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 impact of the research by the Echochroma New Music Research Group at Leeds Metropolitan University relates to new approaches to interactivity in music performance and composition. The group has produced internationally recognised creative works as well as outputs that discuss and establish theoretical models and approaches within contemporary composition, new media and entertainment. These works have been presented internationally to both professionals and the wider public, gaining recognition for outstanding work through international prizes, and influencing practice in the areas of education, entertainment and composition at local, national and international level.
The development of a new compositional tool for electroacoustic music (using technology to explore, create and perform sounds not limited to traditional instrumental sources) based on visual shapes has generated new ways of thinking that influence creative practice, and has inspired and supported new forms of artistic expression. New musical outputs composed by Dr Manuella Blackburn, generated from using the tool, have enriched the lives, imaginations and sensibilities of individuals and groups, locally and internationally. Parallel to this, the tool has been implemented in a number of educational situations (including workshops and textbooks) ranging from school-aged learners (11-18) to university undergraduate students, beyond Liverpool Hope University as the submitting HEI.
`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.
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.
Encounters in the Republic of Heaven is an electroacoustic composition by Trevor Wishart, based on the speech of people in north-east England. The project relied on extensive engagement with local communities, a process which benefited not only the composer but also the people who provided the material for the composition, through public talks and composition workshops. Further beneficiaries were national and international audiences of the finished work, the promoters who organised these and related events, and other users of the software tools developed by Wishart. The production of Encounters has therefore involved three distinct elements, which have each had significant impacts:
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.
A major output from the AHRC Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, the CHARM website—conceived, created and supported at King's—reports research, and provides tools and materials both supporting new research and of value and interest to a wide community of music listeners. These are extensively used by professional and amateur researchers and enthusiasts. Contents include an online discography, a library of historic recordings, studies of the history of recording, an eBook introducing ways of studying recorded performances, papers from CHARM symposia, data derived from recordings, and performance analysis software that has become internationally standard.
The University of Surrey has established the International Guitar Research Centre, led by Prof. Steve Goss and Dr. Milton Mermikides, a central strand of which experiments with the innovative use of acoustic resonance.
Practice-based research outcomes (compositions) have created impact as artworks, having been recorded on Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Telarc, Naxos, and Virgin Classics. CD sales emerging from the project are in excess of 200,000. The compositions have been performed internationally by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.
The new techniques developed at Surrey are utilised by renowned musicians, such as John Williams, Xuefei Yang, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Russell, and Miloš Karadaglić.
Integra was a €3.1M international research collaboration led by Birmingham Conservatoire and funded by the Culture programme of the European Union. It brought together fourteen new music ensembles and research centres across Europe and Canada between 2005 and 2012. Integra achieved impact along three axes:
Technology was transformed through Integra Live, a new application for live interactive music production and through the modernisation of electronic components for musical works from obsolete to sustainable technologies;
Culture was enriched through the commissioning of 16 new musical works with live electronics receiving over 50 international performances;
Education was enhanced through the Integra "curriculum pilot", a programme establishing a culture of live electronics pedagogy in music higher education institutions.