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). All sessions are free and open to the public and a warm welcome is extended to all.
2024/25, semester 2 — Wednesdays at 5.15pm (unless stated otherwise)
Wed 29th January — Studio 2, ARC
Dr Joe Coughlan-Allen (University of Glasgow)
The Phonographic Frame: music, noise, and meaning on record
This paper introduces and explores the concepts of the phonographic frame, which concerns how audio recordings delineate their content from the surrounding world, and phonographic framing, which is how listeners contextualise the sounds within recordings, creating relationships between them and drawing meanings from them.
Firstly, I will compare the phonographic frame to its counterparts in live music performance, photography, cinema, and video. I will then contemplate the relationship between this concept and phonographic framing, the former being an abstract object and the latter being an active process. Finally, I will illustrate the kinds of dynamic relationship created between aspects of music recordings through phonographic framing, integrating theories from communication studies, sound studies, and Peircean semiotics.
___________
Joseph Coughlan-Allen is a lecturer in Sonic Arts at the University of Glasgow. His research interests revolve around the meaning of music recordings, with a focus on the relationship between music and noise. He has published articles in Sound Studies, Popular Music, and Popular Music and Society, and is currently working on turning his PhD thesis into a book with Routledge.
Tue 11th February — Room 237C, ARC
Dr Amparo Fontaine (EHESS, Paris)
Harmony in the Enlightenment. Music, Science and Social Order in France
In this talk, I will present the main arguments of my monograph project Harmony. A Musical Pursuit of Nature and Social Order 18th-Century France. The book explores the concept of musical harmony through various cultural practices, institutions, and social and intellectual debates of the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that a particular understanding of musical harmony was deeply rooted in French culture, embodying key principles and aspirations of the Enlightenment. More fundamentally, the book argues that harmony was perceived as a model for social order. How did a musical concept come to hold such a prominent place in public opinion and become a model for the organisation of society? The book's narrative moves from exploring harmony as an Enlightenment science in the first half of the century, to the reception of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s theories of harmony as the summit of French national character and civilisation in mid-century. It then moves from the negotiation and appropriation of ideas of harmony through corporeal and material practices, to the uses of musical harmony as a model for an ideal form of socio-political organisation during the French Revolution.
___________
Amparo Fontaine is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in France. After receiving her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, she was a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on the cultural history of early-modern music and knowledge. She is currently finishing a book manuscript that explores the notion of musical harmony in the French Enlightenment, spanning the sciences, the body and political culture. Her new project 'Harmony on the Edge. Musical Encounters Between Early Modern Europe and South America' explores the roles of music and sound in shaping European conceptions of non-European populations. She is also affiliated with the Institute of History at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso.
Wed 26th February, 5:30pm — Studio 2, ARC
Dr Jacob Olley (University of Cambridge)
Salih Bey’s Sonometer: Acoustics and Revolution in Fin-de-Siècle Istanbul
The study of acoustics has been the subject of groundbreaking research in recent years by scholars working at the intersections between musicology, sound studies, history of science, and media theory (e.g. Gribenksi 2023; Tkaczyk 2023; Hui 2012; Steege 2012). However, although some research has taken account of the global technological and colonial networks that shaped concepts and practices of acoustics (e.g. McMurray and Mukhopadhyay 2024), there has been little investigation of how these scientific developments were perceived and adapted by non-Western intellectuals and musicians. In this talk, I will discuss the intellectual and political ramifications of debates about acoustics in the late Ottoman Empire. I will focus in particular on the publications of the physicist and mathematician Salih Zeki (1864–1921) and his attempts to measure the pitches of Ottoman music using instruments such as the sonometer. As I will show, Salih’s experiments in acoustics should be understood in the context of his position as the director of the Imperial Meteorological Observatory and his efforts to integrate the Ottoman Empire into international systems of time and space measurement. Furthermore, Salih’s activities and ideas reflect the philosophical movement towards materialism which was the defining ideological force of the Young Turk revolution. The talk will thus situate the history of acoustics and music theory in relation to the diverse intellectual and political movements that led to the recalibration of the global order in the decades around 1900.
___________
Jacob Olley is a Research Associate on the ERC/UKRI project Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1922 at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Music at Cambridge, and Research Associate on the DFG project Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Near Eastern Music Mansucripts at the University of Münster. His publications include a two-volume critical edition of an early nineteenth-century manuscript collection of Ottoman music and the co-edited volume Rhythmic Cycles and Structures in the Art Music of the Middle East (2017). His article 'Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court' (2023) won the American Musicological Society Alfred Einstein Award, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Early Career Prize, and an honourable mention for the Royal Musical Association Jerome Roche Prize. He is currently working on a monograph titled Transcribing Empire: Musical Literacies and the Armenian Enlightenment in Late Ottoman Istanbul.
Wed 12th March — Studio 2, ARC
Dr Nikki Moran (University of Edinburgh)
Bringing musical accompaniment into relief: Why we should, and how we could
Accompaniment is a functional and ubiquitous element of musical performance that spans presentational, participatory, and everyday scenarios of music-making. Accompanists listen, follow and also anticipate. Their contributions appear subordinate, but their material contribution is substantial: done right, accompaniment creates musical forms through which a(nother) voice can take prominence. In this seminar, I will talk about my current project on musical accompaniment, which I’m working on this year through the support of an RSE Personal Research Fellowship award. Drawing on literature from music cognition as well as communication and psychotherapy research, I’ll discuss the interdisciplinary evidence base and methodologies that I’m using to articulate this relational view of music performance. I’ll also talk about how this project intersects with music educational discourse and backing track audio technologies.
___________
Nikki Moran is an interdisciplinary musicologist specialising in music psychology and ethnography, whose work is widely published across scientific, musicological and educational fora. She is Editor-in-Chief of SAGE journal, Psychology of Music, and Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches and supervises across all levels of study. Nikki’s current project examines the creative function of accompaniment in both artistic and everyday settings, and is supported by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Research Fellowship (2024-5).
Wed 19th March — Room 237A, ARC
Dr Matthew Gelbart (Fordham University)
Canonic Variations: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the Black Atlantic
After being for a short time at the turn of the twentieth century the most renowned composer in the UK, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor gradually faded to obscurity after his early death in 1912. Beginning around a century later, as institutions in Europe and the United States have looked to rectify centuries of racism and other bias in programming and teaching, his music has been returning in force to the concert and educational canon. Several recent scholars have looked into the ways in which Coleridge-Taylor—who was born and raised in London and never knew his Krio father from Sierra Leone—came into his “Black” and “Pan-African” musical identities. Those studies have mainly focused on the composer’s own sense of self, his interactions with prominent figures such as W.E.B. DuBois, and his visits to the United States. But the meanings of Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions and the reasons people engage with his music remain as multivalent as they were during his own lifetime. For example, the trilogy of cantatas on which the composer’s fame hung in his heyday, Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha, no longer serves as a particularly appropriate vehicle to anchor new interest in his music. Canons are exercises in community building and narrative building. As such, they serve specific purposes to different communities at different times, while reflecting changing power structures. By recognizing Coleridge-Taylor’s Pan-African ideals and implications as vital yet context-dependent, we can decentralize ideas of 'the canon' and think more about the contingency and interrelationship of multiple canons.
___________
Matthew Gelbart is Professor of Music at Fordham University. He is the author of two books, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology: Belonging in the Age of Originality (Oxford University Press, 2022) and of numerous articles and chapters on nineteenth-century European music and twentieth-century popular music. His work has been tied together by an interest in how we make meaning in music through categories and identities.
Wed 26th March — Studio 2, ARC
Dr Amanda Hsieh (Durham University)
A Formosan Dance across Taipei, Tokyo, and Berlin
This talk focuses on Chiang Wen-yeh (known as Koh Bunya in Japanese) and his status as a twentieth-century East Asian composer of Western art music. Born in Japanese Taiwan (1895–1945), Chiang/Koh was the first East Asian composer to win recognition at an international composition competition. He did so with his piece ‘Formosan Dance’ and, notably, over his own teacher, the eminent Kōsaku Yamada. That competition, however, was the Arts Competition at the ‘Nazi Olympics’ of Berlin 1936, where the music winners all came from the Axis powers. I situate Koh’s compositional success within that broader political context of global fascism, a context that has often been (wilfully or otherwise) overlooked by East Asian writers who claim Chiang/Koh’s success as theirs, whether as Taiwanese, Chinese, or Japanese. Yet Chiang/Koh is irreducible to any postcolonial nationality: he is instead a figure whose life and work represent the complexities that shaped twentieth-century East Asia.
___________
Amanda Hsieh is Assistant Professor in Musicology at Durham University. She is the 2021 winner of the Jerome Roche Prize and the 2023 Kurt Weil Prize. Her ongoing monograph project is tentatively entitled ‘The Japanese Empire’s German Art Music, 1910–1945’.
* Please note that Dr Fontaine’s talk is on a Tuesday and that Dr Olley’s talk starts at 5.30.