Spotlight on postgraduate research work
Our students are looking at some key theoretical and practical issues in the fields of musicology, composition and performance. They’re exploring the relationship of gender to choral singing in late nineteenth century Wales, examining punk and politics in Thatcherite Britain, and revealing the rich but virtually forgotten repertoire of sonatas for violin and continuo written by British-born composers in the first half of the eighteenth century.
What is the relationship between flamenco, regional identity and political autonomy in Andalusia? How do we initiate a discourse of postminimalism in music? How sustainable is music as a resource in the city of Portland, Oregon? How and why did the corpus of Manx secular music change so drastically during the nineteenth century? How do you consider authenticity in the case of bands that do not technically exist?
The features on this area of our website will look at the ways in which our postgraduate students are addressing some of these questions and issues. Our postgraduate student profiles also provide more information about what our current students are working on.
The music scene of Portland, Oregon has become one of the most interesting and diverse scenes in the world. Sam Murray is leading The PDX Music Scene Project (PDX after the Portland airport code, commonly used in place of the city name) to explore how the city sustains its music scene.
It is nothing new to question authenticity in popular music. It has been one of the most frequent problems posed as the study of popular music has grown in academic legitimacy. But how is authenticity established when the artist technically doesn't exist? Alicia Stark discusses her work on authenticity, ethnicity and gender in virtual bands.
Joe O'Connell is aiming to develop a clear picture of the correlation between politics and popular music during the Thatcher decade and question how strong an impact each had on the other.
Eoghan Neff, an award-winning Irish fiddle player and musicologist, recently received his PhD. Eoghan’s thesis, supervised by Dr John Morgan O’Connell, was an examination of twentieth-century Irish fiddle performance practices in the search for the avant-garde of Irish traditional music.