Month: October 2017
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Report: Autumn Postgraduate Forum, Music Research Centre, 27th September
The Autumn 2017 Postgraduate Forum is intended as a welcome to newcomers and a showcase of research by current students. The event reflected the current multifaceted nature of research in Music. Unity was found in this diversity in that so many ideas were concerned with bridging certain boundaries of discipline, venue, musical technique or the […]
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All alone in the moonlight
Memory is the subject of this year’s BBC Radio 3 / Wellcome Collection mini festival, “Why Music?”. I recall as a young violinist that music seemed to embed itself in my fingers so that I never needed to learn to memorise, and never worried that I might forget in performance. Fast-forward a couple of decades (ok maybe a few decades) and I’m looping the first four bars of one of Kurtág’s Signs Games and Messages, desperately trying to alight on the correct continuation in the second phrase and wondering how many times I can get away with the repetition before anyone notices.
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Words and Music 12: What is a Song?
We read all the time that our society is ‘more divided than ever’. I don’t need to reference that – it’s a common trope, and not just in the UK but in the USA and across the world. The inequalities and racial tensions are there for everyone to see. But more divided? I doubt that. Our great castles and cathedrals were not built to house the poor, and even within living memory violent civil wars and extreme racial segregation should give us pause for thought.