Performance

Posts
Midlockdown listening

tmrw> label just released a new piece I have secretly been working on during lockdown: Midlockdown listening :: HDArchive_(date.today) I was asked to do a release on floppy disk by the Berlin-based label, which of course appealed to me so I tried to remember pieces of music that had been released in this format in […]
Projects
Off Grid: The Magic of Microtones

This project brings together ongoing research into the use of microtones from compositional, performance and analytical perspectives. Covering spectral, post-spectral, just intonation, historical and synthetic approaches, this project is particularly concerned with the expressive and structural potential of microtonal environments in interaction with conventional 12edo tuning. Led by Martin Suckling, the project comprises compositions, software […]
News
Martin Suckling on Radulescu at IRCAM

Back in June Martin was invited to speak about Radulescu’s seminal solo viola piece Das Andere alongside violist Garth Knox at the Spectralisms conference in IRCAM. Videorecordings of all sessions in the conference were made and can be viewed here: Spectralisms2019.
News
Neil Luck features in 2019 BBC Proms

Praise for Music Dept students featured in BBC Proms Following on from his specially-commissioned Radio 3 takeover to extend the Last Night of the Proms 2018, Music Department PhD student Neil Luck was invited to contribute a live set as part of 2019’s first ‘Proms at…’ event. Joined by second year undergraduate Rebecca Burden and former student James […]
Posts
Isang Yun Remembered – remembered!

Three Videos from the Isang Yun Remembered Recording Project Music by Isang Yun, Roger Marsh, and John Stringer. Performed by Anna Myatt (soprano), Ching-Han Lin (viola), and Jin Hyung Lim (piano). Supported by the CMRC, the Isang Yun Memorial Centre, and the Tongyeong International Music Festival Although Isang Yun is relatively well-known in parts of […]
News
York composition students work with internationally acclaimed musicians

York composition students have had their music performed by one of Europe’s top string quartets. During an all-day long event, eight new pieces by undergraduate, MA, and PhD students were workshopped and performed by the Paris-based Quatuor Diotima – the department’s Artist-in-association, on Tuesday, 20th November. The event was streamed to students of the Royal […]
Posts
The Butterfly Effect: Music for Non-Performance

The fifth piece in La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 collection begins by instructing a performer to ‘Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area’. The piece was composed while journeying through the mountains of North California, as Young considered the humble Insecta–Lepidoptera. ‘Alone, it made a very beautiful […]
Projects
Words and Music

This project brings together writings and compositions which interrogate the issue of combining words with music. An ongoing series of articles by Roger Marsh, William Brooks and others, addresses the many ways in which composers go beyond conventional word setting routes, exploring significant instances of writers crossing into musical territories and composers composing with words. […]
Posts
Tracing the Net/Netting the Trace

Roger’s recent blog on Holliger’s settings of Beckett, and Bill’s reply, prompted me to offer a few thoughts on the subject of (fairly) recent examples of text and music for voice, with or without piano – or song, if you like to call it that. I’m curious to see how deconstructive strategies derived from the […]
News
The Fidelio Trio May 9/10

The Fidelio Trio give a concert on Wednesday May 9th at 7.30, to include the second performance of the trio Cracks written for them by Roger Marsh in 2017. http://yorkconcerts.co.uk/programme/fideliotrio/ The Trio will also present a seminar on writing for piano trio on Thursday May 10th at 2pm (Rymer Auditorium), which will include a complete […]
News
Federico Reuben in Journal of Music, Technology and Education

The Journal of Music, Technology and Education recently published a special edition on the Online Orchestra, an Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project that run between October 2014 to March 2016. Federico Reuben contributed to this project as lead software developer and as a composer of a piece for female choir, string orchestra, brass and […]
Posts
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.
News
Ben Eyes works as sound designer and engineer for the Jane Horrocks show “Cotton Panic” at Manchester International Festival.

PhD Composition student Ben Eyes is currently working as sound designer and sound engineer for the Jane Horrocks show “Cotton Panic” at Manchester International Festival. The show, based on the story of the cotton famine in Lancashire in 1861, when cotton mill workers came out in solidarity with the emancipation of slaves in […]
Posts
Taking the ‘Toy’ out of Toy Instruments

I have been working exclusively with toy instruments for almost a year now, although the title of this post perhaps implies a degree of severity and gravity in this exploration, which, in reality, was never intended, nor ever materialised.
Posts
Spring postgraduate forum, 2nd March 2017

The music department’s spring postgraduate forum was held on Thursday 2^nd March. We had a packed day with a really wide range of topics covered, issues touched on, and genres explored. Click for full report and timetable.
Posts
A little snow

“Words matter”, wrote Roger Marsh once in this blog. I agree with that. I do like words. Moreover, in this already gone winter the word ‘Snow’ came across in a curious and special way. First, it was my expectation of looking at white landscapes in this -for me- new country, so far away from mine […]
News
PhD candidate Carlos Zamora Perez’s Concerto for Alto Recorder and Strings broadcast on Radio Universidad de Santiago

PhD candidate Carlos Zamora Perez’s Concerto for Alto Recorder and Strings will be broadcasted on Radio Universidad de Santiago in Evening Concert programme. The concerto was composed in 2008 and premiered the same year by Carmen Troncoso as soloist (who is a PhD candidate at CMRC as well) and the Marga-Marga Orchestra conducted by Luis José Recart. The concerto […]
Projects
Player Piano

Player Piano is an interdisciplinary performance created as part of the research project ‘Performance, Subjectivity and Experimentation’, led by Catherine Laws, at the University of York and the Orpheus Research Centre in Music, Ghent. The performance is a collaboration between Catherine (as the performer), composers Edward Jessen, Annea Lockwood, Roger Marsh and Paul Whitty, theatre […]
Projects
Edgelands

Roam the Barbican foyers using headphones to experience this free audio journey, which reframes the sounds and sights of the iconic arts centre. In the company of elusive characters and their fantastic sound worlds, you’re invited to explore, examine, and reimagine the edgelands of the Barbican, seeking out the extraordinary inside a building famed for […]
Projects
Representing Rehearsal

This research project, led by Catherine Laws (Senior Lecturer in Music), Jon Hook (Lecturer in Interactive Media) and Tom Cornford (Lecturer in Theatre) has been funded by the University of York’s Research Priming Fund. Its brief is to scope new possibilities for interactive video technology to facilitate and aid the exploration and documentation of collaborative, […]
Projects
Expressive Nonverbal Communication in Ensemble Performance

The Expressive Nonverbal Communication in Ensemble Performance network comprises three projects, exploring aspects of how musicians communicate in groups: Movement and sonic gestures in ensemble performance Achieving excellence in ensemble singing Teaching and learning of ensemble communication
News
I Fagiolini premieres new work by William Brooks on Radio 3

Robert Hollingworth and Department associate ensemble I Fagiolini gave the first performance of a new Shakespeare setting by Professor William Brooks on Monday 11 April 2016
News
From Score to Sound programme announced

It’s great to be able to announce the programme for the From Score to Sound project. We think these works hold together as a cohesive set, whilst also demonstrating the diversity within the theme of line and melody that Research Fellow Martin Scheuregger wrote about last week. The programme was put together using the British Music Collection as […]
News
World Voice Day 2016

On Saturday 16 April 2016, a celebration of World Voice Day will be held at the University of York, chaired by Dr. Helena Daffern, a member of the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities research student network, ‘Expressive Nonverbal Communication in Ensemble Performance‘.
Posts
Trying to write Greensleeves

In 2013 I attended a composition course in Holland. In a lesson with a well-known Dutch composer I played a piece of mine; when it finished, he told me ‘all English composers are trying to write Greensleeves’. Backhanded compliment or otherwise, he had hit on my predilection for a good tune. Now, working on a project […]
News
CMRC awarded £50,000 AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund grant

Tim Howell has been awarded £50,000 from the AHRC’s 10th Anniversary Cultural Engagement Fund to enable the Department to host a new project, ‘From Score to Sound: engaging audiences with new music’. Tim will work with Research Fellow Martin Scheuregger to deliver the project, which aims to implement and evaluate an approach for engaging the […]
Projects
From Score to Sound

Engaging audiences with new music The Score to Sound project aims to implement and evaluate an approach for engaging the public in twentieth and twenty-first-century British music, and is funded by the AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund. In partnership with Sound and Music (the UK’s charity for new music) the CMRC will facilitate three Discovery Days […]
News
John Stringer’s Disquiet II and Nocturnal

John Stringer’s Disquiet II for solo piano is being performed by Joseph Houston at the University of Sussex and University of York on February 18 and 19.
Projects
Performance, Subjectivity and Experimentation

This project investigates the question of how subjectivity may be variously constituted through musical performance. Who is the ‘I’ that performs, and how is that ‘I’ embodied in the performance? Does that ‘I’ reveal aspects of itself of which it may be otherwise unaware, and if so, to whom: itself (thereby awakening intrapsychic knowledge) or […]
News
Nikki Franklin working with John Zorn

Nikki Franklin & writing partner Sam Eastmond are delighted to be working with John Zorn on the album ‘Cerberus’, released November 2015.
News
Nicola LeFanu’s Tokaido Road comes to York

After a lengthy inception, intensive rehearsal and production period, as well as a tour of the country’s leading music festivals, Nicola LeFanu’s Tokaido Road reaches its final destination next week, when the chamber opera comes to the Jack Lyons Concert Hall.
News
Catherine Laws premieres Ten Bellows (for pianist, assistant and electronics) by Edward Jessen

Catherine Laws gave the first performance of Ten Bellows (for pianist, assistant and electronics) by Edward Jessen, at the Research Festival of the Orpheus Research Centre in Music, Ghent. Catherine also presented a paper linked to the creative work: ‘Company: Collaborative Practice and Subjective Identity’.