In anticipation of the opening weekend of the Southbank Centre’s 20th-century music festival, The Rest is Noise (19th-20th January ‘Here Comes the 20th Century’), please see the following news announcement from Platform:
Current OU students considering attending some of the excellent concerts on offer should pay particular attention to the information at the bottom of the announcement.
“Expressions of Britishness” is a one day conference to be held at the Institute for Musical Research at Senate House, University of London in association with the RMA (Royal Musical Association) and CHOMBEC (Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth) on 11 January 2013.
The OU Music Department will be represented by PhD student David Hammond, who will present a paper entitled “Soft Powering the Empire: British Military Bands, Influence, and Cultural Imperialism in the 20th Century”; and Catherine Tackley, who will speak on “Race, Identity and the Meaning of Jazz in Britain”.
The OU is a partner for a major festival of music to take place all next year at the Southbank Centre in London. Based on Alex Ross’s bestselling book The Rest is Noise, the festival is an ambitious attempt to promote the music of the twentieth century, and will involve the London Philharmonic Orchestra devoting the entirety of its residency at the Southbank to the project. Alongside the more than 100 concerts and 150 talks (to which OU academics will be contributing), the BBC will be showing a three-part documentary series. This is scheduled to be broadcast in February, and has been made in collaboration with the OU. More details will be posted about this in the new year.
Details of the events can be found here, and a Guardian story about the festival here.
The year 2012 marks the centenary of the birth of Australia’s Nobel Prize winning author Patrick White, who died just over twenty years ago. The French online journal Cercles has published a special issue dedicated to Patrick White, edited by David Coad and Jean-François Vernay.
Fiona Richards has contributed to this journal, looking at the role of music in White’s life and works, with a particular focus on the short stories and on three novels: The Aunt’s Story (1948), Voss (1957) and Riders in the Chariot (1974). The article can be read online: http://www.cercles.com/somma.htm
Open University students interested in listening to the music examples in the article can go to the Naxos database via the Open University library and follow the extracts mentioned in the text as listed in the attached file.
A book on the history of European conservatoires has been published, including a chapter by St
aff Tutor in Music, Rosemary Golding. The book is based on a series of papers given at an international conference in Milan in 2008. Golding’s chapter is focussed on the foundation of the Royal College of Music, examined in the context of debates over professionalism and status in the late-nineteenth century.
http://www.lim.it/nuovosito/scheda.php?id=638&ritorno=collana.php&ritorno2=&id_ritorno=
OU music department staff Donald Burrows and Helen Green will present papers at the Handel Institute conference, which will be held at The Foundling Museum, London, on 24 and 25 November. Donald will talk about the relationships of George I and George II with London society and Handel’s experience at court, and Helen’s paper will focus on musical patronage at the Hanoverian court in the early eighteenth century. For further details of the conference, see: http://www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk/events/view/conference-handel-at-court/.
The Music Department will hold its autumn research day on Thursday 15 November from 10:00am to 4:00pm. We will meet in the Music Research Studio on the Milton Keynes campus. See poster here for details and contact information. All are welcome!
With the new James Bond film seemingly the talk of the media, Ben Winters offers a few thoughts on its music in this short article on OpenLearn.
Catherine Tackley has contributed a new post to the Oxford University Press Music blog.
http://blog.oup.com/2012/10/big-band-swing-music-recordings/
