Musicology

The MMus in Critical Musicologyand MPhil/PhD in Critical Musicologyprovide a space for research students to engage with current issues in musicology. There are typically around 10 students studying these courses at a time and supervision is provided by any of the members of staff.

Elisabeth Fosbrooke-Brown

Course: MMus in Critical Musicology

Supervisor: Jonathan Impett

Period of study: October 2005 - September 2007 (intercalated)

Personal website: http://social-musicking.blogspot.com/

Email: e.fosbrooke-brown@uea.ac.uk

Social ad-hoc music-making in England

There is a widely-held view that in Western industrial cultures the custom of making music together on social occasions has been discarded. England is a prime example, having apparently lost more of its folk culture than the rest of Europe. This view appears to be based primarily on the work and theories of folk-music collectors and comparisons with other cultures (especially African) studied by ethnomusicologists.

I am investigating the state of social music-making and attitudes to ad-hoc music-making in England. The research focuses on: music-making by those not usually classed as musicians, in group situations (e.g. community singing); spontaneous music; what is considered appropriate in social music; shared texts. It excludes listening to music (even when it is used actively, e.g. by discussion of the music, or dancing to it) and any form of music for performance (including karaoke).

I intend to review briefly the purposes of social music-making and the change (or decline) in musicking in post-industrial England. To examine its current state, I am looking at the practices of singing football songs and chants, both at football matches and in other environments, and the attitudes of people who engage in such singing toward singing in other circumstances, using Norwich City Football Club as a case-study. This will be quite an adventure, as I have no interest in football!

 

Vanessa Hawes

Course: Ph.D in Critical Musicology

Supervisor: Jonathan Impett

Period of study: October 2004 - January 2008

Personal website: http://www.crikeymiles.com/vanessa/

Email: v.hawes@uea.ac.uk

Music's Experiment with Information Theory

As part of the evolution in music theory during the 1950s and 60s that saw theorists (especially in the USA) vying for the same kind of funding and respect as researchers in the sciences, mathematical and scientific tools were developed for musical analysis. Information theory, as one such tool, was used by various music theorists to describe music structure, style and perception.

Vanessa's thesis is of an interdisciplinary nature. It tracks influences from the history and philosophy of science on music theory and analysis. This allows room for a consideration of interdisciplinarity itself, and what happens to tools from one discipline when they are applied in another. She documents the use of information theory as a tool in music analysis in the 1950s and 60s, from its optimistic beginnings to its fade into obscurity in the 1970s. This history is written in its appropriate scientific, music theoretical and music historical contexts, including the influence of information theory on art and literature.

This project includes a close study of the history of music theory and analysis, and includes a significant analysis of David Kraehenbuehl's 'A Formal Triad,' a piece he wrote as a direct result of his and Edgar Coons' papers about music psychology and information theory. A close study of this piece allows comparisons to be made between methods of information theoretical analysis, and issues addressing the nature of the knowledge obtained through such research can be explored.

 

Victor Hobson

Course: Ph.D in Critical Musicology

Supervisor: Jonathan Impett

Email: victor.hobson@uea.ac.uk

Although the blues is considered to be one of the fundamental ingredients of jazz, little is known about how the blues became a part of the jazz repertoire. The blues revivals of the 1960s led to the rediscovery of a number of rural blues singers, in particular from the Mississippi Delta, and this today is the enduring image that we have of the blues; however, there is also a tradition of blues within jazz that is at least as old.

We know from interviews conducted for the Hogan Archive in New Orleans with the early jazz pioneers that the early jazz bands played a music that they called the blues. Buddy Bolden, the first known cornet king of the city, is known to have played a number of blues tunes that were staples of both later jazz bands as well as rural blues singers.

By 1912 the blues was widely sung in vaudeville, and in the travelling tent shows, and had also appeared as sheet music. By 1920 a blues craze on phonograph had begun, however this was preceded in 1917 with what is generally considered the first jazz recording, 'The Livery Stable Blues' by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

Clearly there was a complex exchange of repertoire taking place in America the early years of the twentieth century. Recent research has begun to develop an understanding of the relationship between the rural blues and the commercial blues of the travelling shows, however there is much to be learned of how this related to the emergence of the blues within jazz. It is the development of the blues within jazz, and its relationship to these other blues traditions that is the principle focus of my research.

I have been greatly assisted in my work by the Hogan Jazz Archive in New Orleans, the Mississippi Blues Archive, and the Jazz Archive of Rutgers University, New Jersey. I am currently (summer 2007) on an AHRC funded scholarship to the John W. Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

I have co-ordinated the jazz workshops 'Jazz as a Verb' for the School of Music U.E.A for the last two years. I have also taught a course 'An Introduction to the History and Theory of Jazz' as part of the 'Studies Outside of Medicine' programme for the School of Medicine U.E.A.; I am currently offering a similar course for the Continuing Education programme of the U.E.A. I co-ordinated the post-graduate seminar programme for the School of Music U.E.A., (2006-2007.)

 

Richard Lewis

Course: MMus in Critical Musicology

Supervisor: Jonathan Impett

Period of study: October 2006 - September 2007

Personal website: http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/

Email: richard.lewis@uea.ac.uk

Richard started in October 2006 and, from a starting point of examing the relationships between digital critical editions of texts, textual encoding methods and their potential for application to musical texts, has expanded into a wider study of computer models of music representation as they are used in many fields including computational music analysis, composition, music notation and digital critical editions of music but also asking exactly what such models are attempting to represent and making a case for rooting them more firmly in musicology than in technology.