Royal Musical Association

With Prof. Fiona M. Palmer and Yajie Ye Fiona M. Palmer (Professor of Music, Maynooth University, Ireland) is a musicologist with a background as a professional orchestral double bassist. Her publications explore music and musicians in Britain (1780s–1930s) by engaging with issues surrounding professionalization, institutions, networking, performance practice, and reception. Her monographs include Conductors in Britain, 1870–1914: Wielding the Baton at the Height of Empire (Boydell, 2017), and she is currently writing a book on the orchestral conducting profession in the 1920s.

Jo Hicks (University of Aberdeen) speaks to Mollie Carlyle (Maritime Musicologist) about all things musical mapping. Jo is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Aberdeen, having previously held research fellowships at the Lincoln College (Oxford), Kings College London, and Newcastle University. His work is focused on music and theatre in 19th-century Britain. Jo co-edited The Melodramatic Moment: Musical and Theatrical Culture, 1790-1820, and has published in journals including Nineteenth-Century Music, The Journal of Musicology, and the Cambridge Opera Journal.

Prof. Pauline Fairclough (University of Bristol) talks to the RMA Podcast about her new book, an Oxford Keynote volume on Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’. The book is available to purchase here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/shostakovichs-lady-macbeth-of-the-mtsensk-district-9780197534939?cc=gb&lang=en& Pauline Fairclough in conversation with Dan Elphick (RMA communications officer).

Conservatoire training for singers and pianists tends to revolve around core skills and core repertoire. Changes in the music industry, however, demand a fresh look at what it means to be a singer and a pianist in the 21st century, together with a reappraisal of what their core skills might be. Responding to these challenges the Guildhall School has over the last 8 years developed a unique form of music theatre which expands both skill set and repertoire, staging song in specially devised narrative contexts that draw out from both singers and pianists a new level of imaginative input. Iain Burnside discusses some of his recent projects alongside two Guildhall students who took part in them – and outlines the benefits of combining song, speech and movement in bringing new perspectives on song repertoire. Iain Burnside is a pianist who has appeared in recital with many of the world’s leading singers (“pretty much ideal” BBC Music Magazine). His recordings straddle an exuberantly eclectic repertoire from Beethoven and Schubert to the cutting edge Gramophone Award-winning NMC Songbook. Away from the piano Burnside is active as a writer and broadcaster. As presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Voices he won a Sony Radio Award. His play A Soldier and a Maker, created at the Guildhall School, was performed at the Barbican Centre and Cheltenham Festival and broadcast by Radio 3 on Armistice Day (“searing” Daily Telegraph). Iain Burnside is Artistic Director of the Ludlow English Song Weekend and Artistic Consultant to Grange Park Opera. Soprano Claire Lees recently graduated from the Opera Course at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. She is a Samling Artist and is a recipient of an Independent Opera Voice Scholarship and Fellowship.  Claire regularly performs with her duo partner in the Netherlands for the Vrienden van het Lied (Friends of the Song). She has performed in numerous venues such as the Wigmore Hall, the Barbican Hall, St James’ Piccadilly, St Martin-in-the-Fields and Peterborough Cathedral.  Claire has worked with Iain Burnside on his Drums and Guns project in collaboration with the Juilliard School and Royal Irish Academy of Music, performing in Dublin, London and New York.  She sang in her first season in the Glyndebourne Festival Chorus in 2018. Adam Sullivan is a tenor with the ENO Chorus. He performs throughout London.

https://www.rma.ac.uk/rmawp/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/RMA-Podcast-Schenker-Documents-Online-002.mp3 Schenker Documents Online has played a significant role in animating interest in many aspects of analyst Heinrich Schenker’s life. The project was founded in 2004 with the aim to stimulate biographical, historical and socio-cultural study of Schenker and his circle by publishing his correspondence in an online scholarly edition. The site has since grown into an award-winning digital humanities resource, yielding over 1,500 items of correspondence and a full run of diary entries from 1918 until Schenker’s death in 1935. Here, three of its key contributors discuss the project and its far-reaching implications for research, and digitisation in the humanities. Ian Bent is an Honorary Professor in the History of Music Theory at University of Cambridge. Previously he was Full Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York. His chief interest is the history of music theory and analysis. William Drabkin is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Southampton. Recently, his work has investigated the correspondence of Heinrich Schenker and his pupils and acquaintances. Georg Burgstaller received his Ph.D. from the University of Southampton. Embedded in the Schenker Documents Online international research project, his doctoral dissertation explored socio-cultural aspects of German music journalism during the fin-de-siècle and the first world war. Since this discussion was recorded in September 2016, an application to the Austrian Science Fund, put together by our Vienna editor Marko Deisinger with assistance from Andrea Reiter, has received three years’ funding to complete transcription and translation of the remaining parts of Schenker’s diary. We must also record, with sadness, the death of Professor Reiter on 14 November 2018, at the age of 61, after a two-year battle with leukaemia; she had been an important contributor not only to Schenker Documents Online but also to most of the Schenker translation projects since the early 1990s, and her expertise in interpreting Schenker’s writing will be greatly missed.

https://www.rma.ac.uk/rmawp/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/RMA-Podcast-Jo-Cormac.mp3 How much does academic research come to influence the making of films about classical composers? Drawing on archival material from the USC Cinema and TV library, the Margaret Herrick Library in LA, and the BFI archives, Jo Cormac has studied a range of films about Chopin and Liszt, including Charles Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945), Charles Vidor and George Cukor’s Song without End (1960), Ken Russell’s Lisztomania (1975) and James Lapine’s Impromptu (1991). She discusses the types of scholarly sources used by producers of composer biopics, and the tensions between academic input and directorial vision. Joanne Cormac is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow and during the academic year 2017-18 she was also a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. During the 2018 autumn semester she will took up a Visiting Researcher position at Georgetown University, Washington DC. She studied Music at the University of Nottingham (BA) and at the University of Birmingham (MMus and PhD). From 2013-15 she was a Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University. Joanne’s research interests include 19th-century music and culture, with particular interests in the symphony after Beethoven, the music of Franz Liszt, biography, historiography, and reception issues. She is the author of Liszt and the Symphonic Poem (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

https://www.rma.ac.uk/rmawp/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/RMA-Podcast-Laudan-Nooshin-003.mp3 ‘Standing on a flat rooftop in north Tehran on a summer’s evening I am immersed in sound: the strains of the call to prayer echoing from local mosques; a rock beat from a passing car; the call of birds circling the mountains; a distant ringtone; the low-level hum of the city below.’ (Field notes, 2015) Iran’s capital city is a vibrant metropolis, cradled in the foothills of the Alborz mountains, and the country’s political and cultural centre for over 200 years. Drawing on recent fieldwork in Tehran and on the writings of scholars such as Matt Sakakeeny and Abigail Wood, Laudan Nooshin discusses the relationship between Tehran’s urban environment and sound, including the work of local rappers. Professor Laudan Nooshin is the head of the Department of Music at City University, London. Her recent publications include the monograph Iranian Classical Music: The Discourses and Practice of Creativity (Ashgate Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 British Forum for Ethnomusicology Book prize, and the edited volumes Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (Ashgate Press, 2009) and The Ethnomusicology of Western Art Music (Routledge, 2014), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She has also written a chapter on ‘Hip-hop Tehran: Migrating Styles, Musical Meanings, Marginalised Voices’ as part of the volume Migrating Music (Routledge, 2011). Laudan regularly writes feature articles and reviews CDs of Iranian music for Songlines: The World Music Magazine and is often contacted for advice and information on Iranian music and invited to speak about her research.