Music

Collectio Musicorum (“Collection of Music”) presents a concert of music from Scotland, dating from the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries.  It takes place at Christ and St Stephen’s Church, 120 W 69th St, New York, NY 10023, on Friday, October 18th at 8 PM.  Admission is Free.

Much of the programme is devoted to music by Robert Johnson, a priest and reformer, (called “The Heretic Priest”) who was forced to flee Scotland due to his reformed religious views.  A prolific composer, his music has recently been edited by OU Music’s Dr Elaine Moohan as part of the Musica Scotica series.  This music has never before been performed in the United States.

The performers include singers Amanda Sidebottom, Padraic Costello, Nate Adams, and Andrew Padgett; harpist Christopher Thompson and lutenist Christopher Morrongiello, all under the direction of Collectio Musicorum’s artistic director, Dr Jeff S. Dailey.

Also, Collectio Musicorum will be performing part of the programme the week before, on Thursday, October 10th at 1 PM at St. Bartholomew’s Church.  Details may be found here.

The Department of Music at the Open University invites applications for October 2020 entry to its PhD programme.

Our research was rated 1st in the UK in the Guardian’s analysis of the last Research Excellence Framework, and 8th in the Times Higher Education table.

We have a wide range of expertise, from music of the medieval period to the present day including film music, electronic music and non-Western music. Specialisms in the Music Department cover historical musicology, the social and cultural study of music, music analysis, editing, performance practice, iconography, ethnomusicology, music and literature studies and musical acoustics.

For further details of staff and student research interests see: http://fass.open.ac.uk/music/people and http://fass.open.ac.uk/music/research-degree

Studentships
Successful applicants to the Music PhD programme will have the opportunity to apply for an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC studentship. Awards for UK residents cover all tuition fees and provide a maintenance grant at the standard RCUK rate (£15,009 p.a. in 2019/20). Awards for students ordinarily resident in an EU country other than the UK are fees-only.

The Open-Oxford-Cambridge is an exciting new doctoral training partnership, funded by the AHRC. The three participating universities share extensive expertise in delivering successful doctoral training, developed in collaboration with our students and a wide range of non-HEI partners. For more information about the Open-Oxford-Cambridge partnership, please visit http://www.oocdtp.ac.uk.

How to apply
Informal enquiries about studentships and PhD studies in Music should be made to Helen Barlow at FASS-Music-Enquiries@open.ac.uk in the first instance. Potential applicants are encouraged to e-mail a draft research proposal at least one month before the deadline.

Further details of the application process for Open-Oxford-Cambridge studentships can be found here: http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/funding/ooc-dtp

Initially, applications for studentships will be assessed for a place on the Music PhD programme. Successful applicants will then be forwarded to studentship panels for further assessment and ranking.

Please note that the deadline for all postgraduate research degree applications, including for studentships, is noon 8 January 2020.

Robert Johnson Complete Works, edited by Dr Elaine Moohan is now in press and will be available shortly from the Scottish Music Centre, Glasgow. This edition of Johnson’s (d. c. 1560) works is the result of a lengthy research project that started with Elaine’s late colleague, Dr Kenneth Elliott, in the 1960s. All of the works have been newly edited for this publication over a period of three years, supported with funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh that enabled Elaine to consult some sixty manuscript sources and nine early printed music and literary books in UK and American libraries. To date, only a handful of Johnson’s works have been published in modern notation. This is the first time that all of his surviving works, including some fragmentary pieces, are published together in a format that is both scholarly and suitable for performers.

There are nine Latin- and eleven English-texted sacred works, in a range of styles with something to suit all choral abilities. Three of the four English songs have accompaniment for instrumental ensemble, and the works solely for instrumental ensemble are in three, four, and five parts. The volume includes reconstructions of five of the nine fragmentary works.

Another event in the Department’s partnership with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) takes place on Friday 31 May at the Southbank Centre, London.

The OAE is giving a concert with the title ‘States of Independence’ at 7:00 pm in the Royal Festival Hall, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. The programme includes Sibelius’s Second Symphony, preceded by Elgar’s Serenade for Strings and Richard Strauss’s Violin Concerto.

Dr Robert Samuels will take part in a pre-concert event, a panel discussion on the imagery and aesthetics of Sibelius with the conductor and members of the orchestra. The event will take place in the Level Five Function Room at 6 pm.

Full details of the concert are available from the OAE website.

Admission to the pre-concert event is free. Students can buy tickets for the concert for five pounds through the OAE box office (telephone 020 7239 9375).