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Awakening Sleeping Beauty

Dr Kate Guthrie, who is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department, tells us about a new article that has just come out: Margot Fonteyn as Princess Aurora and Robert Helpmann as Prince Florimund in the Awakening scene (Act III) of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet production of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ (1946) at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden Last week, my article ‘Awakening The Sleeping Beauty: The Creation of National Ballet in Britain’ came out in Music... Continue reading →

Bad Music in Oslo?

Can a piece of music can be inherently bad, or are all such judgements purely subjective? Associate Professor in Composition Matthew Shlomowitz reports on a recent premier in Oslo addressing such issues. I was commissioned by the Ultima Festival in Oslo to compose a forty-minute work for the Plus Minus Ensemble, a group I direct with English composer Joanna Bailie. For this commission I decided to do something different: instead of writing a piece, I wrote a ‘lecture-piece’. Continue reading →

Harpsichords at Cheltenham

This week postgraduate researcher and harpsichordist Christopher Lewis starred as player and presenter at the Cheltenham Music Festival –  for ‘A History of the Modern Harpsichord: An Afternoon at the Salle Cortot’.  Here he tells us more about the purpose of the event : The university’s Feldberg harpsichord on holiday in Cheltenham Early on Monday, a small group of us from the University of Southampton departed for the prestigious Cheltenham Music Festival. Continue reading →

Meet the (modern) pianos

In the final instalment of our Meet the Pianos series for this year, David Owen Norris introduces some of our modern concert grands.  Many people will find these more familiar-looking than our rarer historic instruments. But they’re not all the same, and modern piano firms, just like their 18th-century counterparts, search to create instruments with their own characteristic sounds. Continue reading →

New video – Composing for voices with Finnissy and EXAUDI

Michael Finnissy at Aldeburgh Back in March, our professor of composition Michael Finnissy joined the leading contemporary ensemble EXAUDI for a residency at the Britten-Pears centre at Aldeburgh.  Along with EXAUDI’s director James Weeks and soprano Juliet Fraser, Michael directed a course that gave young composers the chance to work directly with six of the singers from Exaudi in practical sessions as they developed new work and explored the challenges of composing for voices. Continue reading →