A new book has been published by Routledge in their Music and Screen Media Series called Music, Sound, and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema. Edited by James Wierzbicki, it features a chapter by OU Music Lecturer Ben Winters about the films of Wes Anderson (including Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, and Fantastic Mr Fox)
To mark their 20th year, the Voice of the Listener & Viewer Awards for Excellence in Broadcasting have created a new VLV Multiplatform Award. The 2011 prize winner has been announced as Symphony – “for so interestingly and entertainingly exploring the classical symphony, from Haydn to Shostakovich, across BBC Radio 3, BBC Four and BBC Online.”
The series was produced as a collaboration between BBC4 television, the Open University Music Department (with Robert Samuels as lead academic), BBC Orchestras, Radio 3, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra Learning division. Essays on the associated website were contributed by OU music department members Robert Samuels, Fiona Richards, and Ben Winters.
The award was presented on 30 April 2012 as part of the VLV‘s Spring Conference.
Music department lecturer Ben Winters has just published a new article in the latest issue of the Cambridge Opera Journal (vol. 23 issue 1-2) entitled ‘Strangling blondes: nineteenth-century femininity and Korngold’s Die tote Stadt’
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=OPR&volumeId=23&issueId=1-2
The Open University Music Department is pleased to welcome Dr Helen Green to her new role as Lecturer in Music. Helen took up her position in January but is no stranger to the OU or the Music Department, having worked as an Associate Lecturer and been Research Associate on the Handel Documents Project (something to which she’s continuing to contribute).
Helen’s research interests concern the patronage of musicians in German and English cities and courts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and she’s just about to start a project on musical patronage in Hanover during the early eighteenth century, funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant.
Today we welcome Dr Naomi Barker and Dr Ruth Herbert, two experienced associate lecturers who have been appointed as 0.4 lecturers to help maintain our modules during a period in which the department is short staffed.
Naomi is currently working on the management team of Gateshead Schools’ Music Service, and aside from her activities as a scholar she is also a baroque flautist. Her 2007 article for the journal Early Music entitled ‘Undiscarded Images: Illustrations of antique instruments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books and their sources’ (vol. 35) was one of the ten most downloaded in February of this year, and her other publications include an entry on Agostino Licino in The New Grove.
Ruth, who is also a professional pianist, has recently published a book with Ashgate (2011) entitled Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation and Trancing, and has contributed articles on the phenomenology of everyday listening, trance, consciousness transformation and musical engagement to journals including Ethnomusicology Forum and Musica Scientaie. She is currently running the pilot stage of a three-year research project examining the subjective music experiences of young people aged 10 to 18.
“Debussy: Text and Idea”, an international Debussy symposium, will take place at Gresham College, London on 12-13 April 2012. It is organised and supported by the Institute of Musical Research (University of London), Gresham College, the Royal College of Music, and the Open University. The OU’s Music and Literature Group, which includes music department lecturer Dr Robert Samuels, will be participating, and former OU music lecturer Prof. Richard Langham Smith is part of the organising committee.
Further details (including a draft of the programme) can be found on the IMR’s website. Places are limited, so book now if interested.
The next Open University Choir concert on 22 March has a Scottish theme, and presents two world premières; it also has a truly OU story behind it.
William Bowie was head teacher of music at the Royal High School in Edinburgh throughout the 1950s and 60s, during which time he completed his own musical studies by taking two external degrees at Durham University.
The OU Choir’s conductor, Bill Strang, was among his school pupils and two years ago the OU Choir sang three of Bowie’s short published pieces. In the audience for that concert was another former pupil, David Appleton, who in retirement was a student on the OU course Words and Music. David subsequently selected one of the pieces he had heard, Bowie’s setting of Charles Causley’s ‘Three Masts’, as the basis of his course project and whilst carrying out his researches at Durham, he located the manuscript of Bowie’s Master of Music Exercise which Bill Strang had previously failed to find.
This turned out to contain two compositions. One is a setting for soloists, chorus and orchestra based on the ballad ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ by Sir Walter Scott: this recounts how Thomas was spirited away by the Queen of Elfland to be endowed with special powers to write poetry and to foresee the future. The other is a purely orchestral piece, ‘A Scottish Overture’, which is designed to demonstrate the candidate’s grasp of symphonic form using themes inflected with folk-song elements.
Both these works will receive their first performances in this concert.
The programme will also contain complementary works which extend the Scottish theme, including another of Bowie’s published works and music by sixteenth-century Scottish composers reflecting Bowie’s interests as a conductor. It will be completed with Bill Strang’s choral prelude on the 12th-century Orcadian Hymn to St Magnus which he has revised for the forces available in this concert.
Our soloists in this performance are Amanda Morrison, soprano, and Paul Rendall, tenor.
The concert will take place in the Hub Theatre, Walton Hall, at 1 pm on Thursday 22 March. Thanks to the generosity of the Open University and the support of the OU Club we are able to present this concert free of charge. The concert is open to all, and all are welcome. The poster can be downloaded here.
Open University Choir website
Symphony won the award for ‘Best Partnership’ at the BBC Audio & Music Awards, held at New Broadcasting House on 13 March. The series was produced as a collaboration between BBC4 television, the Open University Music Department, BBC Orchestras, Radio 3, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra Learning division.
The judges of the awards specifically praised the intellectual depth and challenge of the series, and in her acceptance speech Helen Mansfield, the Executive Producer, warmly thanked the Open University Music Department for its involvement.
The lead academic in the partnership was Robert Samuels, and the associated website also features essays by Ben Winters and Fiona Richards.
The series is currently being re-broadcast on BBC4 TV on Fridays and Saturdays, with the previous week’s episodes available on the BBC iPlayer.
Helen Mansfield (BBC4), Jessica Isaacs (Radio 3), Michael Ledger (BBC4), Robert Samuels (OU) and Paul Hughes (BBC SO) receiving the award
On Tuesday 13 March, Music Department lecturer Ben Winters will be giving a paper at Goldsmiths, University of London entitled “Moments of Desperation and Peril: Hollywood and Concert Performance.” The event is free, and will take place from 5-7pm in the Small Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building. All are welcome.
More details can be found here.
The BBC4 TV series “Symphony”, transmitted in November 2011 and currently enjoying a re-run on Friday nights at 7.30, has been nominated for the “best partnership” Award at the BBC annual Audio & Music Awards — the result will be announced next week (13 March).
The series and its associated website were produced in partnership between the Arts Faculty (Music Department) and the BBC. The academics involved were Dr Robert Samuels, Dr Ben Winters, and Dr Fiona Richards.
