Object #12. Rob Young’s Electric Eden and Environmental Disaster.

Posted on 6 December 2017 by Lauren Sourbutts

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

Object #11. Nick Land’s Meltdown: Cycles of Futurism in Internet Music Culture

Posted on 15 November 2017 by Lauren Sourbutts

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

Object #10. Marxism and Form

Posted on 24 August 2017 by Lauren Sourbutts

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

Object #9. Brassed Off: Gender Stereotypes and the Sexualisation of Instruments, on- and off-screen

Posted on 3 August 2017 by Lauren Sourbutts

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

Object #8. Coma Notes

Posted on 29 June 2017 by Lauren Sourbutts

By Poumpak Charuprakorn (PhD in Composition) My composition ‘Never-ending Torture’ for soprano and harp was composed for the event ‘Coma notes: music and poetry exploring consciousness and coma’,
Read more

Object #7. Buzuk & Çifteli: Genetic Divergence on the Long-necked Lute Family Tree

Posted on 5 June 2017 by Lauren Sourbutts

By Jeffrey P Charest, PhD student For Object #7, PhD student Jeffrey Charest discusses the cifteli and the buzuk, which he presented at the Postgraduate Forum. “At the Postgrad Forum I talked about two Albanian plucked string instruments, the çifteli and the buzuk. The former, played mostly in northern Albania, has two strings while the buzuk,
Read more

Object #6. Archival Documents of Napoleonic Milan

Posted on 22 May 2017 by Lauren Sourbutts

By Alessandra Palidda (PhD) My PhD project focuses on the relationship between music, society and politics in the city of Milan between 1790 and 1802. I have chosen this particular timeframe because, following the outcome of the so-called Napoleonic wars, Northern Italy went through a particularly complex political season, its government repeatedly changing within just
Read more