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Postgraduate, Page 4

Share the Sound on screen

Wessex Films, the award-winning Students' Union creative industries society, spent the weekend of our Share the Sound festival filming up-and-coming jazz and pop artists from the Music department.  They've produced a fantastic new video for us to help spread the word for next year's edition of the festival.  Check it out below! Coming to Talking Heads in March 2016 . . . .       https://youtu. Continue reading →

Meet the pianos again

In the second of our series of  'Meet the pianos' videos, David Owen Norris introduces an instrument like the ones Jane Austen would have known - a wonderful 1796 Broadwood grand piano. We acquired the Broadwood four years ago, and it has been a hard-working addition to our historic piano collection. Continue reading →

Cross Channel Collaboration

PhD composer Martin Humphries tells us a little about a recent collaboration between Southampton composers and Belgium based Ensemble Fractales: Over the past five months myself and two fellow PhD Composition candidates have been engaged in an exciting and incredibly rewarding collaboration with Brussels-based contemporary music group Ensemble Fractales. Continue reading →

La Vittoria – Waterloo in music

Katrina Faulds has recently finished her PhD on dance and dance music in the English country house c. 1800.  She is also an accomplished performer on early pianos, and last week saw her presenting some of her research in sound: In November last year,  Dr Penelope Cave and I were offered the opportunity to perform a concert at Chawton House Library as part of the Music department’s regular collaborative series. Continue reading →

Hartley Residencies in Music: Laura Tunbridge

In February 2015, the Music Department launched the Hartley Residencies in Music – an annual programme of two-day visits from eminent scholars. Post-graduate research student Xin Ying Ch'ng recounts her experience of our most recent event: We were privileged to welcome Laura Tunbridge, Associate Professor from the University of Oxford, St Catherine’s College for the Music Department’s second Hartley Residency in Music on the 21st and 22nd of April. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

Meet the pianos

Almost all of our students and staff use some form of keyboard nearly every day.  They are indispensable for a whole range of our activities - whether for solo performance or accompaniment, for bands and ensembles, or for working out harmony exercises and new composition ideas. Because keyboards are so central to our programmes, they also represent the largest cost in our performance budget.  We are starting a new funding drive to help. Continue reading →

Showcasing our interns

Becky Gribble and Talea Bartlet formed the other half of the inaugural Turner Sims intern team.  While teammates Louisa and Cerys focussed on programme editing and marketing in the concert hall, Becky and Talea were the managers of the Southampton Showcase programme for advanced student performers.  Here's how they spent their year: We applied for the position in the intern team to further our experience in arts management, as this was not an opportunity available to most students. Continue reading →

The Cello Suites and Mrs Bach

PhD researcher Nadya Markovska reflects on controversies of authorship and what this says about our attitudes to performance and composition: Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello (BWV 1007-1012) are among the most famous pieces in the canon of Western music. Recent claims by the Australian researcher Martin Jarvis about their authorship have become a media sensation, causing heated scholarly debates in normally restrained musicological circles. Continue reading →

The science of music

Senior lecturer Dr Richard Polfreman and postgraduate researcher Dan Halford will be taking part in the University's Science and Engineering Day this weekend on Saturday 14th March: Events are running all day on Highfield Campus, and details can be found on the event web site and Facebook page. We'll be demonstrating some of the technologies involved in our research into non-standard controllers for musical performance. Continue reading →

Pianos on the high seas

Postgraduate researcher Anna Borg Cardona has uncovered maritime musical connections between Southampton and her home country of Malta: By 1814, Malta had become a British colony. British families soon began to settle on the Islands, accompanying army and navy personnel who were posted there. Some families transported their own musical instruments with them. Recognising potential commercial opportunities, merchants also began to establish a base on the Islands. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →