Music in Contemporary Culture
The Department has wide-reaching expertise in twentieth and twenty-first century music, with a particular focus upon the intersections of music and contemporary culture.
Areas of specialism include
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Composition
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Music and urban geography
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Critical theory
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Marxism, music and politics
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Music on stage and screen
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Music and ethics.
Staff research specialisms
Department research on recent and contemporary music addresses a wide variety of repertoires, including;
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Rap and hip-hop,
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Recent jazz,
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Film music,
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Contemporary concert music,
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Experimental and avant-garde music
and encompass a range of methodological and analytical approaches. Individual differences aside, this research falls broadly into two categories.
Staff working in this area include:
Ideology, politics and ethics in music
Music has always been intimately bound up with the belief systems of the culture of which it is a part. Musical activity is both shaped by those belief systems, most obviously through patronage and censorship, and helps to produce and sustain them, both through its powerful effects on mind and body and through discourse on music. The Department is active in exploring this relationship as it pertains to contemporary culture. Current Department research projects address the role of political and social movements in late twentieth-century composition, the history of the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde, and the interrelation of music and ethics. Musical production is thereby understood as linked to broader currents of thought and idea in the modern world, through which its meanings are articulated.
Situations and practices of music
Music is encountered in widely varying situations in contemporary culture, and these varying situations produce different kinds of musical practice. Department research explores these conjunctions through both scholarly investigation and professional practice. Particular attention is given to the relation of music to place and space, and to the evolving roles of music in film and television. Interest in each of these areas is shared by researchers in the School of Geography and the Institute of Film Studies. Research in composition is centrally concerned with establishing innovative yet practical responses to the varying demands of present-day performers – be they professional new music ensembles, youth orchestras, or student soloists. In all of these research fields, the way in which music actually functions within contemporary culture is placed centre stage.