Research Projects in the Department of Music
Featured Music research projects
Funding body:
Arts and Humanities Research Council
Principal Investigator:
Professor Thorlac Turville-Petre (School of English)
Specialist Music Researcher: Dr Philip Weller, Lecturer, Department of Music
Research output:
Library and web-based multimedia presentations.
» More information on The Wollaton Antiphonal
Further Music research projects
RILM Database Project
The Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) was established in 1966 under the joint sponsorship of the International Musicological Society and International Association of Music Libraries. It is a continually updated bibliography of writings on music - including books, journal articles, congress reports and dissertations - based at the RILM International Center in New York. The fully searchable database currently has over 500,000 records from 151 countries, and each record includes full publication details and an abstract. It is available online (through content providers) and updated monthly.
The collection and submission of details of UK publications to RILM International has been funded by two AHRC grants (Royal Holloway, 1999-2004; Nottingham, 2005-8). In May 2008, the Department of Music at the University of Nottingham secured an annual grant from the Institute of Musical Research to ensure that coverage of UK research will be maintained for the foreseeable future.
Vassilis Vavoulis was appointed as RILM-UK Co-ordinator in 2005, and he continues to work with members of the RILM-UK committee: Richard Chesser (Chair; British Library), Chris Banks (University of Aberdeen Library) and Sarah Hibberd (University of Nottingham). Find out more about the RILM database project.
The Music Anthology of Hermann Pötzlinger
This three-year research project (2004/7) is funded by a large grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is being carried out by Professor Peter Wright (Project Director) and Ian Rumbold (Senior Research Fellow).
The focal point of the project is one of the most important surviving sources of late medieval polyphony: manuscript Clm 14274 of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, known to musicologists as the 'St Emmeram Codex' because of its association with the Benedictine monastery of St Emmeram in Regensburg. The owner and compiler of the manuscript was a priest named Hermann Pötzlinger, who came from Bayreuth, studied at the University of Vienna in the 1430s (and possibly later at the University of Leipzig) and spent the last part of his life as schoolmaster. More about the Music Anthology of Hermann Pötzlinger project.
Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic
The early nineteenth-century stage genre of melodrama presented its audiences with clear and unambiguous visible and audible signs expressing the moral struggle between good and evil. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in communicating meaning as spoken dialogue. However, the role of music has traditionally been underestimated by scholars, owing in part to its simple – and what has been perceived as clichéd – vocabulary. Visit the project website for further information.
Moving Experience: Narrative and Locative Media
Moving Experience is an EPSRC funded Pervasive Media project that seeks to explore how audiences engage with narrative forms across a range of spaces and technologies. It brings together filmmaker Rik Lander (www.you-are-here.co.uk) with academics (led by Elizabeth Evans: elizabeth.evans@nottingham.ac.uk) from a range of disciplines including film and television studies, music, performance studies, social science and computer science in order to create a pervasive drama experience that incorporates film, theatre, audioplays, music and opera in a public space. In doing so it raises the potential of ‘experiential drama’ in which the audience is placed directly into a narrative in ways unseen in more traditional entertainment and art forms.
By combining multiple narrative forms and different kinds of experience, the project seeks to answer key questions concerning the nature of those forms and audience engagement with them.
By creating an experience in public space, the project also seeks to explore questions concerning the relationship between engagement and physical context. How do different media forms lend themselves to different kinds of engagement? How do audiences shift between ‘emotional’ engagement and ‘intellectual’ engagement? Can this shift be used to raise awareness or understanding of particular social issues? How does the geographic and spatial context of a narrative experience shape its effectiveness? How does participants’ sense of belonging to ‘an audience’ shift across different narrative forms and through different spaces? The project seeks to work with charities, museums and technological partners in order to examine how different narrative forms can aid an individual’s understanding of the world around them.