About CMRU

The aim of fostering a broad and inclusive approach to research methodologies, interpretative positions, analytical techniques, creative strategies and performance practices.

The Contemporary Music Research Unit (CMRU) was founded in 2011 with a view to fostering a wide range of research into composition, performance, aesthetics and theoretical approaches to new music, bringing together composers, performers, theorist, and other artists/practitioners.

The CMRU aims to encourage clear and focussed methodologies towards articulating well-defined approaches to practice-based research in composition, performance and theory of new music. The encouraged interdisciplinary nature of the research reveals new fields of enquiry sometimes informed by what initially appear to be opposing tendencies, through critical, reflective and inclusive strategies of investigation.

We promote and organise conferences, lectures, concerts and workshops focussing on new approaches to composition, improvisation, notation, new instruments/instrumental techniques and the philosophy and politics of new music.

Recent areas of research include

• Composition, Culture and Politics
• Microtonal Music
• Notation/Improvisation
• New instruments/instrumental techniques