Event overview
Current postgraduate students in the Department of Music discuss their research.
Alexis Bennett: "Thoughts about Gender in Examples of British Film Music in the 1930s"
Bennett will discuss his current research into how British film music in the 1930s might be received as somehow gendered, with reference to quasi-leitmotivic scores for the biopics of great historical figures, both male and female.
Wojciech Kosma: "Composing Laughter"
Kosma’s recent compositional project collected a number of performances containing large elements of unsuppressed and contagious natural laughter which were contextualised as music. This paper will discuss the ways in which the material is notated (mostly using a system of conversational analysis transcription developed by Gail Jefferson), and its performance and repeatability. It will also investigate its musical properties, e.g. its pitch and rhythmic structure. A variety of different significations of laughter are cited and developed, reaching beyond the usual scope of music, e.g. laughter as a physiological or social phenomenon. Particularly close attention will be paid to the philosophical framing of laughter, in texts of Nietzsche and Jean-Luc Nancy, and also indirectly in the work of Jacques Attali, and in the ideas and music of John Cage.
Stephen Graham: “An Introduction to my Doctoral Research on Underground Music”
The term “Underground Music” connects various forms of music making that exist largely outside mainstream cultural discourse. Its implication of what Giorgio Agamben has described in relation to parodic literature as “paraontology”, along with its connotations of concealment, of obscurity, even of threat, indicate the music’s central tenets of cultural reclusion and aesthetic experiment. Underground music forms a sort of interzone of culture that draws both from “popular” and “serious” discourses of music, which is little explained or understood in the scholarly literature. Graham will give a short introduction to the topic, focusing particularly on the range of methodologies he has developed in the course of his research and his specific core interest - to delineate ways in which the new phenomena of immaterial music, widespread piracy, global sharing networks and self-determining models of publicity and promotion have affected Underground Music, a field in which principles of piracy and anti-capitalism, and practices of self-determined production, have long been dominant.
All welcome - not just for graduates!
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Nov 2011 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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