By David Aijon Bruno (MA Music Studies) When I volunteered to give this rather improvised presentation for Cardiff University’s Postgraduate Forum, little did I know that the platform came with blogs attached. And so this post will make things I had wished to keep private a bit more public than I’d probably like, but so Read more
By Thomas Pitt (MA in Music Studies) Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) was never shy of borrowing (or, more accurately, stealing) materials from other composers’ works, whether by direct quotation or by stylistic evocation. Often, he does this in order to create what Daniel Albright (in Untwisting the Serpent, 2000) calls an ‘acoustic collage’, cutting and pasting Read more
By Andrew Goddard (MA Music) Being a fan of K-pop – that is, pop music from South Korea – I decided to present at the Postgraduate Forum the music video of GFRIEND’s song ‘Me Gustas Tu’ as an object of discussion. I shared GFRIEND’s video because it exemplifies the deeply politicised nature of K-pop. Read more
By Isabel Thomas (MA Music) About three years ago I bought the book Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, (London: Faber, 2010) by Rob Young, in the brilliant second-hand section of Blackwell’s in Oxford. It provides a survey of ‘the idea of folk’ in British music over the last century, from composers such as John Read more
By Henry Morgan (PhD Musicology) Recently, I have been investigating the Internet as a relatively new and unique cultural space in which artistic communities are formed and musical activity is based. Read more
By Benjamin Davis (PhD Musicology) The object I have chosen is Fredric Jameson’s book Marxism and Form (1971), in which he postulates that history, as absent cause, shapes cultural forms and leaves traces in them of the situations of their making and reception. Read more
By Harriett Blakeman, MA (Performance) Directed by Mark Herman, Brassed Off (1996) confronts social and political tensions prevalent in late twentieth-century Britain. Herman portrays a colliery brass band threatened by pit closures and under investigation from the British Coal Board. For the band members, the ensemble is one of the many areas of their lives Read more
