Research seminars are an important aspect of the research environment in music at Newcastle University. They showcase some of the most distinguished and cutting-edge thinking and practice in music. They bring renowned thinkers and practitioners to the University, and the seminars are also a platform for homegrown research dissemination. They are often linked to current research projects or research groups run by us or with which we are affiliated. 

Research Seminar Series, Spring 2023

Wednesdays 4pm, Armstrong Building, Room G.17 [unless stated otherwise below]

Wednesday 8 Feb, 4:30pm [please note later start] | Ellie Armon Azoulay (Newcastle) | Reclaiming the Lore and Anti-Preservation Practices: On the Work of African American Music Collectors  

From the late 19th century, there was an intensive movement and effort on the part of African- descent music collectors to trace and study Black musical expression on a diasporic scale. The music and sounds they heard and the individuals and communities they met contributed to their attempts to make sense of their shared past and present. This talk will offer a different mapping of the field by bringing to the fore and celebrating the radical practices of African American collectors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Willis Laurence James, and Lorenzo Dow Turner. By playing and contextualising songs and recordings they made in the US and the African Diaspora during the 20th century, Dr Azoulay will discuss innovative methods of collecting, performing and (non) archiving sonic expressions and how this collecting became a means to redress rupture with past generations and renew intergenerational practices of cultural memory.  

Wednesday 15 Feb, 4pm [subject to industrial action] | Jorge Boehringer (Newcastle) | Sonification as Solvent: Object-Data Dissolved in Phenomenal Experience 

Sonification can be used to understand, explore, analyse, monitor, and present data within any number of fields of inquiry.  Critical artistic decision making is essential to fabricating sonifications that make the best use of the special affordances of listening, sound, and space while remaining free of perceptual and material factors that produce fatigue, distraction, and bias.  Despite the deep need for skilled designers knowledgeable about sound and listening, artistic practitioners are not received on their own terms within the current academic discourse around sonification. Addressing this issue, this talk examines fundamental concepts around sonification from artistic practice and data science.  Dr Boehringer demonstrate some results of the marginalization of creative artists on the emerging field of sonification, proposing an alternative vision that locates sonification as an intersection of truly interdisciplinary practices, approached with a balance of openness and criticality.  

Saturday 4 March, 3pm *at the Lit & Phil as part of TUSK North* | Edward George (Independent) | An Edition of the Strangeness of Dub 

See https://morleyradio.co.uk/series/the-strangeness-of-dub/ for previous editions of this blend of critical theory, social history, a deep and wide cross-genre musical selection, and live dub mixing. Edward George is a writer, researcher, and presenter of Black Audio Film Collective’s ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History. Edward is a founder of Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1998), the multimedia duo Flow Motion (1996–present), and the electronic music group Hallucinator (1998–present).

Wednesday 15 March, 4pm [subject to industrial action] | Adam Behr (Newcastle) | Mapping Urban Live Music Ecologies: Methods, reflections and questions

This talk reflects on several projects that have involved ‘mapping’ – in various ways – the live music sector(s) of UK cities, within wider ‘live music census’ projects, and as part of more discrete, geographically bounded exercises. Drawing on these, Dr Behr reflect on the logistics of mapping live music activity in cities, alongside their various contexts (geographical, political, industrial). He also considers the various different kinds of mapping exercise that have taken place, the definitional issues that arise, and their relationship (and utility) to live music provision. 

Wednesday 22 March, 4pm [subject to industrial action] | Jamie Savan & Helen Roberts (Birmingham City) | Winds of Change: The Role of Coventry’s Waits from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries 

Coventry’s civic waits were a consistent feature of the city’s cultural life from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, contributing to religious festivals and processions, as well as secular feasts and celebrations of the guilds and craft fellowships. They were a distinctive and indispensable component of Coventry’s performance of civic and ecclesiastical ritual, as a public articulation of a well-ordered city, even (or especially) during times of profound political and religious change. This talk examines the paper trail left by this ensemble over some two hundred years of its existence and explores aspects of the urban environment in which their music would have been experienced by the citizens of Coventry. This work forms part of a larger, AHRC-funded project, Aural Histories: Coventry c.1451–1642, which explores the experience of music in late-medieval and early-modern Coventry through VR reconstructions of its lost performance spaces.

Wednesday 26 April, 4pm | Amanda Hsieh (Durham) | Staging Hänsel und Gretel in Japan, 1913 

This talk examines the 1913 staging of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel at the Tokyo Imperial Theatre, which opened in 1911 as Japan’s first Western-style theatre. By studying the theatre programmes, production photos, and relevant commentaries in newspapers and magazines, Dr Hsieh argues that the 1913 Hänsel, a post-Wagnerian fairy-tale opera, represented an occasion on which the Japanese actively assuaged its fervent Wagnerism before they could undertake Wagner’s monumental works. Instead of an instance where Rosi enchanted the Japanese audience with his European expertise, the 1913 translated and abridged version of Hänsel was to a large extent the collective effort of the translator-playwright Shōyō Matsui; members of the Imperial Theatre’s affiliated arts school, which began as the actress Sada Yacco’s Imperial Actress Training School; and supporters such as industrialist Ichizō Kobayashi and playwright Kaoru Osanai, for promoting the acceptance of actresses on stage. Dr Hsieh foregrounds Japanese involvement – their agency and creativity – in a hitherto Eurocentric interpretation of the history of Japan’s Hänsel, challenging the received wisdom depicting Japan as merely imitative in its pursuits of Western modernity.

Wednesday 10 May, 4pm | Oliver Chandler (Oxford) | 12-Tone British Solo Guitar Music and Julian Bream: Smith Brindle, ApIvor, Wilson, Bennett 

While the history of the formation of a modern British guitar repertoire around the central figure of Julian Bream is known in broad brushstrokes, we lack a thoroughgoing, technical understanding of the particular idiom that Bream’s composers developed. Important in the nascent stages of the guitar’s modernist evolution, for example, was its relationship to twelve-tone serialism. Through close readings of individual works by Reginald Smith Brindle (El polifemo de oro, 1956), Denis ApIvor (Variations for solo guitar, 1958), Thomas Wilson (Three Pieces 1961; Soliloquy 1969), and Richard Rodney Bennett (Impromptus, 1968; Sonata for solo guitar, 1983), Dr Chandler maps the formation of a peculiarly British vein of dodecaphony. To varying extents, these composers adapted or rejected the techniques, systems, and/or aesthetics of the Second Viennese and Darmstadt schools in order to arrive at a more moderate compositional approach. But despite this common cause, their approaches to composing dodecaphonically on the guitar differed substantially. By exploring the foregoing ideas and themes analytically, this talk attempts to demonstrate, in as musical a way as possible, how some of the most pressing compositional questions of the mid-twentieth century—Is twelve-tone serialism the only way forward? Is musical tradition dead in the water?—were responded to by composers crucial to the guitar’s modernist legacy.