Virginia Anderson
University Teacher, Faculty of Arts
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Expertise Summary
Virginia Anderson specialises in the philosophy and aesthetics of experimental music culture, especially that of experimental indeterminacy and postmodern experimentalism. Her master's thesis, British Experimental Music: Cornelius Cardew and His Contemporaries (published in 1999 by the Experimental Music Catalogue under the same title) was the first independent full-length study British experimental music and forms an amplification and explanation of the sections on British experimental music in Michael Nyman's Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Her doctoral dissertation, 'Aspects of British Experimental Music as a Separate Art-music Culture' examines experimentalism within its own cultural values and 'insider' knowledge. She was one of the earliest (and still one of the few) researchers to use musicological methodology in the study of experimental indeterminacy, text notation, and conceptual pieces.
Anderson is the editor of the peer-review Journal of Experimental Music Studies and is on the board of the Experimental Music Catalogue. She is currently working on a chapter on British experimentalism for an upcoming book re-evaluating approaches to experimental music that will be published by the University of California Press, a conference paper on student minimalism in Southern California in the 1970s for the Third International Conference on Musical Minimalism in Leuven, Belgium in October 2011. She leads the British arm of a European-wide research project on improvisation in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, which will exhibit its results in Italy, beginning in late 2012. She has completed a chapter on British art music for a book on music and protest in 1968 for Cambridge University Press. Another chapter, on the analysis of music in graphic and text notation, will come out in a book on sound and scores for the University of Leuven Press. An article on the English composer John White and the alternative British experimental aesthetic is in preparation; another article, on listening and the perception of time in experimental music for Performance Research came out in September 2010.
Until the mid-1990s, Anderson was also a clarinettist specialising in avant-garde, experimental and postmodern music, especially for the Eb clarinet (a substantial part of the repertoire for this instrument was written for her). Her biography appears in Phillip Rehfeldt's New Directions for Clarinet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). She has also recorded substantially, both in reading ensembles and as an improvising musician. Her teaching experience includes pop, rock, film studies, as well as other twentieth-century topics, ensembles, musicianship and music appreciation.
Teaching Summary
I am currently convenor for dissertations for the department and teach research skills and topics in music anthropology and ethnomusicology for postgraduates. My Guide to the Library and Online… read more
Research Summary
British experimental music, systems and minimalism, free experimental improvisation, indeterminacy, text and verbal notation, historiography and philosophy of history, West Coast American minimalism… read more
Recent Publications
ANDERSON, V., 2010. '(Re)Marking Time in the Audition of Experimental Music' Performance Research. 15(3), 27-35
ANDERSON, V., 2009. 'Comfy Cushions and Golden Grandiosi:Instruments of British Experimentalism' Galpin Society Journal. 62, 273-286
ANDERSON, V., 2008. The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts, by Pwyll ap Sion NOTES -NEW YORK- MUSIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATION-. VOL 65(NUMB 1), 87-88
I am currently convenor for dissertations for the department and teach research skills and topics in music anthropology and ethnomusicology for postgraduates. My Guide to the Library and Online Research is in its second edition; an Essential Guide to Dissertations is also in its final stages. I set up a first-year basic elements course and have taught tonal analysis courses, as well as a course in essay writing and other critical skills for new students. I have developed courses in experimental notation, dream sequences in music, and other specialist seminars, as well as a course on the music of other cultures and societies and to the tools of oral history and other skills. Although I do not currently offer outreach courses for non-musicians, I have taught many courses introducing non-musicians to listening skills for 'classical' and popular music and have given lectures for lay audiences at festivals and other events. I am a former nominee for the Dearing Teaching Award.
Current Research
British experimental music, systems and minimalism, free experimental improvisation, indeterminacy, text and verbal notation, historiography and philosophy of history, West Coast American minimalism and postminimalism.
Past Research
American experimental music, blues and ethnomusicological methodology, popular music (particularly rock and pop), extended techniques for clarinet, aesthetics of modern notation, modernist theatre music, music for film and theatre
Future Research
Music for film, television, animation; music as ritual and melodramatic elements in twentieth-century music,