RMA Research Colloquia in Music
Music hosts a series of colloquia on behalf of the Royal Musical Association featuring national and international guest speakers, along with staff and postgraduate students.
All talks take place in-person, either at the ARC (see map) or the Music Building, 14 University Gardens (see map). All sessions are free and open to the public and a warm welcome is extended to all.
2024/25, semester 1 — Wednesdays at 5.15pm
Wed 9th October — Room 237C, ARC
Dr Tom Mudd (University of Edinburgh)
‘Musical Instruments as Processes: Following the No-Input Mixing Desk’
This talk explores the musical practice of playing a mixing desk as a synthesiser. Examining this practice, known as no-input mixing, tells the story of how a contemporary musical instrument has developed and spread, and how it counters established ideas of what instruments are and why they are valuable. The instrument's unpredictability is a key part of the appeal and brings the playing experience closer to that of an acoustic instrument. While new instruments tend to be ephemeral, no-input mixer use has spread slowly but surely, despite – and perhaps due to – being practically immune to commercialisation. It has found its way into a diverse range of fields, from slick Taylor Swift productions to harsh noise via contemporary music, free improv, metal, dub, techno and more.
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Tom Mudd is a musician and programmer interested in relationships between software and music making, particularly what software ‘knows’ about music. Recent work has revolved around physical models: digital synthesis processes based on simulations of acoustic objects and instruments. He is a lecturer and researcher in computer music and digital audio at the School of Music, University of Edinburgh.
Wed 23rd October — Audio Lab, 14 University Gardens
Dr Anita Mackenzie Mills (UHI Perth)
‘Power Dynamics in Performance Education - Exploring the Impact of Dialogic Pedagogy in HE Musicianship’
In the field of popular music education there has been a movement towards self-directed learning, which in practice can mean a lack of facilitation and band work that is entirely student directed. Whilst this is in many ways a positive direction, it raises questions about inclusion. When students with marginalised perspectives are present, there is a risk that consensus silences minority contributions, to the detriment of the creative collaborative process. Various papers discuss the need for facilitation, but there is little information or research into approaches. This study examined the impact of a dialogic process introducing critical pedagogy into practical musicianship classes at final year degree level. Classes were underpinned by dialogic principles (Alexander, 2018) to be collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative and purposeful. Research examined open discussion problematising collaborative issues, and potential solutions. These were built on classes introducing topics within a critical pedagogy framework around systemic elements to marginalisation within the music industry, considering the wider contexts to challenge perceptions of individual failure. Interviews and questionnaires explored student perceptions of the inclusion of dialogic working within musicianship, and were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clark, 2022). Themes were developed on openness/process focus, development of self-efficacy through collaborative reflective practice, and the importance of vulnerability and the safer space. Findings also demonstrated the need for educators’ robust reflective practice, a role for facilitation in the development of trust and recommendations from students that group discussion should be part of musicianship work throughout the degree. Diverse learners reported benefits including stress reduction, feelings of inclusion, confidence and enhanced effectiveness of collaborative outputs. While this study was carried out within a popular music course, there are elements that could apply to performance studies and the development of creative practice in other forms of music.
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Anita Mackenzie, FHEA, is a lecturer in music at UHI Perth and recently completed a MEd in Learning and Teaching in the Arts at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She is a performer, composer and writer – a combination commissioned in ‘Skin’ at the Push the Boat Out festival, using live performance and electronics. She co-wrote ‘For Us Girls of Colour Making Half Notes into Song when the Haar is All’ which previewed at Edinburgh Lyceum in 2023. Previously a professional opera singer, she has always had parallel interests in performing other genres including jazz, folk and music from the global majority. Working now within popular music(s) provides insights across the borders of performance pedagogy. Her intersectional identities inform her research which is underpinned by decolonisation as process, aiming for impacts on belonging and inclusion.
Wed 6th November — Studio 2, ARC
Dr Elia Romera-Figueroa (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
‘Spanish Protest Song in Italy: Music Censorship and Feminism in the 1970s’
The talk presents Que trata de Spagna, a crucial anti-Franco gathering held in Italy that was organized to raise money for the clandestine Spanish labor movement, and that brought politically committed international artists together—including painters, writers, and several singers-songwriters like Elisa Serna and Julia León. Placing their song lyrics in the context of this gathering and by listening to them in relation to contemporary national and international events, allow us to better understand how singers used concerts abroad to evade censorship at home, even if they often faced reprisals when they returned to Spain. Both Serna and León were included in the regime’s listas negras (blacklists) and they suffered repercussions for having participated in Que trata de Spagna. This gathering further illustrates the friendships that united cantautoras and it shows how singer-songwriters were also building networks of relationships beyond music with other anti-Franco artists. Together, they weakened the dictatorship by sharing with the international community the repression suffered in Spain by the labor and students’ movement, women, and artists themselves.
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Elia Romera-Figueroa holds a doctorate from Duke University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid and Glasgow University, under the CIVIS3i – Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions COFUND fellowship. Her research areas of expertise focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Iberian cultural studies, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality studies, music and performance, (post)memory, and transatlantic LatinX studies. Her writings have appeared at the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Status Quaestionis, Cultural Dynamics, among others. Romera-Figueroa is currently at work on her forthcoming book Gendering Anti-Francoism: Cantautoras in Spain (1952–1986), which explores how Iberian female singer-songwriters engaged with the anti-Franco struggle during the dictatorship and the transition to democracy. “Gendering Anti-Francoism” is the first sustained analysis on cantautoras that brings together gender studies and music studies, offering new historical protagonists that expand the canon of the time.
Wed 20th November — Studio 2, ARC
Dr Florian Scheding (Bristol University)
‘20th-century Song Between Stasis and Mobillity’
In the ‘age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration’, to use Edward Said’s descriptor, art song of the 20th century is permeated by its engagement with mobility. In my paper, I focus on two songs, Hanns Eisler’s ‘An den kleinen Radioapparat’ and ‘Berjoskele’ by Viktor Ullmann. Both were written against the background of catastrophe. Ullmann composed his as part of the collection ‘Brezulinka (Drei jiddische Lieder)’ in the Terezín concentration camp in 1944, only months before he was killed in Auschwitz. ‘An den kleinen Radioapparat’, later included in the ‘Hollywooder Liederbuch’, was composed in 1942, during Eisler’s time as a refugee in California. In this sense, both songs charter the displacements and human tragedies caused by political catastrophe. Beyond that, however, they both open up a number of dialectical engagements. I trace the extent to which mobility and stasis intersect in the songs and offer a reading that detects both nationalist as well as internationalist commitments. Against the backdrop of the Shoah, both songs bear witness to the fact that the displaced person, the refugee, and the migrant are simultaneously marginalised, but also located at the centre of history and human narrative. Neither song quotes the other, either implicitly or explicitly, and it is unlikely that either composer knew the other’s song when writing theirs. Nonetheless, both songs contribute towards an emerging nexus of migratory culture and a wider migratory aesthetic of music history.
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Florian Scheding is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. His research area is music and migration, with a focus on the 20th century. He has published widely on migratory musics in all its forms, ranging across functional, popular, and art musics. His first book, Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, co-edited with Erik Levi, was named Outstanding Publication of the Year by Choice Magazine. His second book, Musical Journeys: Performing Migration in 20th-century Music, received the Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Monograph Prize 2020.
Wed 4th December — Studio 2, ARC
Dr Toby Bennett (University of Westminster)
‘Musicking the organisation: Corporate life in the digital music industry’
In this presentation, I ask how music textures and shapes processes of industrial transformation. I do so by drawing from my book (Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry) examining the restructuring of UK major record labels from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s, in response to the ‘digital disruption’ of popular music distribution. The reassertion of major label control was no foregone conclusion. Work within popular music studies has, within this context, drawn frequent attention to the labour of recording and performing musicians, or sometimes to small-scale music entrepreneurs, and their various entanglements within financialised technological structures and corporate power. Yet, the role of the organisation itself has drawn little analytic interest. For this we must look elsewhere. Sociologically- and anthropologically-informed music scholars (from the likes of Christopher Small or Howard Becker to Antoine Hennion or Georgina Born and collaborators) have consistently sought to decentre the figure of the artist: allowing for creative agency while highlighting the backgrounded conventions and processes of mediation through which music objects come into being. Meanwhile, research in organisation studies (from Alexander Styhre, Nic Beech, Charlotte Gilmore, Marek Korczynski and others) has paid close attention to music – either the creation, production and distribution of music as a ‘special case’, or the everyday experience of music as a cultural resource for managers and employees. I argue that such antecedents offer a useful means of explaining the kinds of organisational change that was necessary within the major labels. Moreover, rather than paint a critical portrait of the contemporary musician’s plight, they might also help us explore the construction and maintenance of organisational systems, and forms of working practice, that are more adequate to music as a distinct aesthetic object.
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Toby Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation in the School of Media and Communications at University of Westminster. He leads the MA Global Media Business, in partnership with the Communication University of China. He is also a member of the Communication and Media Research Institute, coordinating the research seminar series, and a production editor for the Journal of Cultural Economy. His book Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry (Bloomsbury 2024) documents how employees in major record companies managed and shaped digitisation processes.