Southampton Saxophones in Strasbourg
First stop for the summer vacation: the World Saxophone Congress. Kathryn Firth, who just finished her BA Hons Music, tells us about it here.
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Prize for Southampton composition alumnus
Congratulations to Southampton alumnus Marios Stylianou (BA Hons Music, 2013), whose piece Ethnominimal was awarded second prize in Coups de Vent, a prestigious international composition competition for new works for symphonic band. This year's competition was on the theme of world music, and there were 152 entrants from 36 countries.
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Electric guitar conference in Bowling Green
PhD composition student Ben Jameson tells us about his recent trip to a conference over in the USA:
The 'Electric Guitar in Popular Culture' conference took place at Bowling Green State University, Ohio at the end of March. The conference was organised by Dr. Matt Donahue from the university’s Department of Popular Culture, and brought together scholars and musicians from around North America and the rest of the world with a shared enthusiasm for the electric guitar.
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Reaching Moldova through music
Our music therapy lecturer Sarah Hodkinson is lead music therapy clinician of a strategy team that has been working in Moldova for several years.
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Cantores in Germany
Choral scholar Emma Bryant reports on a recent tour by the university's choral scholars, who travelled from home base at the ancient city centre church of St Michael's in Southampton to some equally wonderful venues in Germany:
Over the Easter vacation Cantores Michaelis, the University of Southampton choral scholars, spent four days in the German town of Lüdenscheid and performed two concerts there and in the nearby town of Herford.
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Studying the piano on video
Our head of keyboard studies, Professor David Owen Norris, has been working with the university's educational film unit to put together a video on what it's like to study the piano at Southampton.
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New opera for Graz
Composition lecturer Dr Matthew Shlomowitz has just received an exciting commission for a new opera: In early 2014 I submitted a short proposal for a one-hour opera to the 6th Johann Joseph Fux Competition for Opera Composition presented by the Province of Styria in Austria. Later in the year I was one of six composers selected to progress to the second round of the competition, and asked to write a scene and develop my proposal (concept, libretto) further.
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One week, two operas
Dr Francesco Izzo (Senior Lecturer in Music) talks about recent opera productions:
I go to the opera frequently, but the past week has been an especially exciting one. On Sunday, 8 February at the Frankfurt Opera, I had the opportunity to attend one of the rare modern performances of Antonio Cesti’s L’Orontea—one of the most successful operas of the mid seventeenth century.
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Ensemble Fractales in Southampton
A special guest blog from Hannah Reardon-Smith, the flautist in Ensemble Fractales, who recently visited Southampton as part of a collaborative project with some of our PhD composers:
Ensemble Fractales from the MaNaMa contemporary music master course in Ghent, Belgium, recently had the opportunity to visit the University of Southampton to work with three of the young composers there.
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Venus in Galway
Natalie Davies, who finished her BA Honours Music degree last summer, had operatic dreams come true over the summer: In May 2014, I was lucky enough to be accompanied by Erin Headley and Elizabeth Kenny on the lirone and theorbo respectively, whilst singing early music duets in a concert with my duet partner, Leila Zanette, at the University of Southampton.
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Mozart in Salzburg
PhD researcher David Jayasuriya is writing his thesis on the application of Fonte and Monte harmonic schemata in the symphonies of Joseph Haydn. Over the summer vacation he had the opportunity to present some of his work at a prestigious international conference: A highlight of my summer break was to attend and present a paper at the International Mozart Kongress in Salzburg.
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Instruments in Istanbul
In the first of a series of posts on 'What I did over the summer vacation', postgraduate Anna Borg Cardona, who is researching instrument-making and musical culture in 17th-century Malta, tells us about the instruments she encountered on her trip to Turkey:
Destination Istanbul – finally! This was the magical Constantinople which attracted so many Europeans in the 19th century.
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Exchanging the Middle Ages
In one of our final posts before breaking for the summer, another recent guest talks about her exchange visit to Southampton from her university in Spain: My name is Nuria Torres and I’m a PhD student at the Complutense University of Madrid, where I’m working on my PhD thesis on medieval music under the supervision of Carmen Julia Gutiérrez.
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Transatlantic thoughts
US scholar-performer Dr Vivian Montgomery reflects on her stay in Southampton during a Fulbright fellowship: As I near the end of my time in the UK as a Fulbright Senior Scholar, I’m astonished by both how much has happened and how much more I could do with another 6 months. I came to Southampton in January after 5 days staying in Durham Castle for the Fulbright Forum.
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Nationalism in the North
PhD students Xin Ying Ch'ng and Jacopo Mazzeo report back about their trip to Helsinki, Finland, for the 'Confronting the National in the Musical Past' international conference:
We were greeted with unusually sunny weather upon reaching the Finnish capital the day before the conference. Xin Ying was starting to think that bringing her coat seemed like a waste of luggage space.
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