Music Alumni Newsletter

Issue 1

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Robin Holloway retires from the Faculty of Music on 30 September 2011 after 32 years of service. To mark the occasion, the Faculty is arranging a celebratory concert, which will take place on Saturday 12 November 2011 at West Road Concert Hall. Huw Watkins and Ryan Wigglesworth will perform Robin’s Gilded Goldbergs at 6.00pm, and the concert will be followed at 8.00pm by a reception at which our alumni are very welcome. If you would like to attend, please contact Terry Wylie (tkw23@ cam.ac.uk). Tickets, which cover the cost of the concert and the reception (at which food and drink will be served), are £18 (full) and £6 (students).

www.mus.cam.ac.uk If you have any comments or suggestions, or if you know of anyone who might like to receive this newsletter and is not on our mailing-list, please contact: Newsletter Editor Faculty of Music University of Cambridge 11 West Road Cambridge CB3 9DP Email: newslettereditor@mus.cam.ac.uk

July 2011

Welcome from the Chairman of the Faculty Board

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elcome to the first issue of the Faculty of Music’s newsletter. It’s a great time to launch this publication.

The Faculty has seen some exciting changes in the past few years, and even recent graduates might be surprised to learn just how different today’s Faculty is from what it was only a few years ago.

Any faculty’s greatest resource is its people, both staff and students (present and, of course, past). In 2009 we were delighted to welcome Nicholas Cook to the 1684 Chair. Since arriving, Nick has initiated a process of change, the results of which you can read about in the articles that follow. These have been far-reaching, though they preserve, we hope, all those things that make Cambridge music so distinctive.

Shortly after Nick’s arrival we were joined by John Rink. He comes to us as Professor of Musical Performance Studies and as Director of a major new research centre, the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice. John’s presence has helped us develop increasingly close connections between academic studies and performance. This new focus is reflected in changes to the Tripos, in the development of a new Master’s programme in choral studies, and in a new series of performers’ workshops.

At the same time, we continue to promote our niche ensembles, the New Music Ensemble and the Collegium Musicum, and we now work increasingly closely with CUMS on performancerelated projects.

Other appointments have also helped make this possible. The distinguished violinist Margaret Faultless has joined the Faculty as our new Director of Performance Studies, while John Hopkins has come to Music from Education in the role of Co-ordinator of Practice-Based Studies: he runs composers’ workshops and takes a special interest in the promotion of new music. And two years ago Ruth Hardie joined us as Outreach Officer. She has rapidly made herself

indispensable, revolutionising the way the Faculty engages with the outside world, and the musically marginalised in particular. Finally, we have recently welcomed Sarah Hawkins, who has moved to Music from Linguistics. The parallels between speech and music are numerous and fascinating, and Sarah’s distinctive perspective has given a fillip to the already flourishing Centre for Music and Science.

As I write, we are awaiting the outcomes of the interviews for two new posts. One will be in popular music and culture, an area that, to judge by dissertation titles alone, excites increasing numbers of students. The second will be a temporary post.

Inevitably, the passage of time also brings departures. We shall soon be bidding farewell to Robin Holloway as a full-time staff member. Robin’s contribution to music at Cambridge has been enormous, and his retirement will be marked with a special concert and party that is likely to bring many of Robin’s former pupils back to Cambridge. (Please see the side panel for details.) We also register with sadness the departure of Tim Brown, who served for many years as an Affiliated Lecturer. He stood down from his post at Clare last September to take up fresh challenges at home and abroad.

In this first issue of our newsletter we have much to tell you. But in future issues we would like to include news and views from former students and friends. So please don’t hesitate to let us know what you’re doing, or tell us about issues that might be of interest to your fellow alumni. You can contact us via people you know in the Faculty (an excuse to catch up), or email us at newslettereditor@mus.cam.ac.uk.

Dr Martin Ennis

Teaching for Today and Tomorrow

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imes change, and so do curricula. Cambridge was one of the first UK universities to bring the study of music and science and of non-Western music into the curriculum; now our teaching also encompasses jazz, media and popular music (the latter helped by the award of a two-year Mellon Fellowship in Popular Music and Culture). We are also integrating practice-based work into the curriculum. Both composition and performance will soon be available in all three years of the Tripos: composition is already supported by a regular Composers’ Workshop, while practical performance will be linked to an academic track in performance studies, extending from undergraduate level into the Master’s and doctoral programmes. And both composers and performers benefit from working with our resident ensembles and from our developing programme of masterclasses. These are some of the key elements of a major revision of the Music Tripos that is now nearing completion.

But not everything changes. When we consulted our students at an early stage of the revision process, they gave us a clear message: don’t dumb down the technical and analytical training! Cambridge will remain one of a diminishing number of music departments where students can learn to write a fugue (though they can add a soundtrack to a cartoon if they prefer). Nor will there be a diminution in the challenging historical teaching for which the Faculty has long been known. And while Part IA will become a tightly structured foundation year, we are retaining the opportunities for self-directed work that for some time have been a popular feature of the Cambridge Tripos, allowing students to play to their strengths and acquire the knowledge and skills they need as they progress to further study or a chosen career. All this is contained within an overall curricular structure that is designed for simplicity, clarity and flexibility. The new Tripos will begin in October 2012.

Undergraduate teaching is, of course, just one strand of our work. An entirely 2

new Master’s programme began in 2010, the MMus in Choral Studies: this one-year course combines academic study and practical performance, with each student having the opportunity to observe and, in some cases, work

with the leading Cambridge Chapel choirs. Harnessing the complementary strengths of the Faculty and the Colleges has produced a unique course, which is already attracting international interest. We are relaunching our existing MPhil programme, with an integrated programme in Music Studies beginning this year: there are separate tracks covering musicology, music and science, non-Western and popular musics, performance studies, and composition.

As many MPhil students continue on to the PhD, this will further develop the breadth and vitality of advanced musical studies at Cambridge. We are also revising the PhD programme to allow doctorates in composition and the submission of recorded performances as an integral element of a doctoral project. And it will soon be possible to work for a doctorate on a parttime basis: we intend this primarily for composers and performers who want to build a freelance career alongside advanced study, but it may also prove a lifeline for other students unable to obtain full-time funding.

Quite apart from the formal curricula that we offer, the Faculty is keenly pursuing new opportunities to develop young musicians and the professional performers of tomorrow. An important new initiative is the launch of our ‘Practising Performance’ series, which is directed by Margaret Faultless, John Rink and Martin Ennis: so far this has featured an ambitious ‘Side by Side’ event run by Margaret Faultless in conjunction with the Academy of Ancient Music, whose musicians worked alongside student performers in rehearsal and performance. Other ‘Practising Performance’ events this year have involved the fortepianists Benoît Hartoin and John Irving, the harpsichordist Ketil Haugsand, and the concert pianist Yundi Li. Finally, we were privileged to host Alfred Brendel as the first Humanitas Visiting Professor in Chamber Music, and are already planning next year’s lectures in this high-profile new series.

Add to all of this a constant flow of visiting students from the UK, Europe, and overseas, and you have one of the world’s most vibrant centres for studying music.

© James Appleton

The Faculty and the Future

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e hope that this newsletter will convey to you our excitement over what has happened in the Faculty in the last few years and our optimism about what can happen in the future. We have a renewed undergraduate curriculum and new graduate courses with expanding numbers. We are finding innovative ways to bring together academic study and performance. We have gained a new research centre and have had many successes in winning research funding. And as we go to press we are interviewing for two fixed-term academic posts, with a permanent lectureship in Composition to follow in the coming year.

All this has been achieved at a time of financial turmoil, with higher education at the sharp end. Of course, the University has weathered many storms in its 800-year history. But difficult

circumstances make it particularly important to plan for the future, and we have developed a strategic plan to consolidate the Faculty’s position as one of the elite group of international leaders in music education and research. Our aim is to achieve a fully balanced coverage of the field of music as it exists in today’s world, with the accommodation and facilities to support teaching and research at the very highest level.

are fully represented in teaching that will prepare our students for tomorrow’s world. Elsewhere in this issue you can read about our outreach programme, for which we are hoping to secure long-term funding. And we hope to strengthen student support to ensure that a Cambridge education, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, is available to everyone who can best benefit from it, regardless of personal circumstances.

This plan involves a number of key projects which we are working to secure. One is an endowed Professorship in Composition, to build on Cambridge’s remarkable heritage as a centre for musical creativity; our unique environment of practical musicmaking makes Cambridge one of the best places in the world for advanced compositional training. Another is a Centre for Contemporary Music Studies that will give full weight to the diversity of today’s musical traditions, both classical and popular, ensuring that they

You can read more about our plans for the future at www.mus.cam.ac.uk/ future, and you can find out about Faculty events – at which you would be very welcome indeed – at www.mus. cam.ac.uk/events.

Nicholas Cook 1684 Professor of Music 3

Research in the Faculty

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ur research is flourishing. The Faculty made an outstanding showing in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, in which 45% of our submitted research was judged to be world-leading, and a further 40% internationally excellent. The research excellence that underpinned this achievement provides a strong foundation on which we are building for the future.

Our two Centres help to give us a high profile in their research areas. The Centre for Music and Science (CMS) was established as a physical entity in 2003, through a combination of public and private funding, and successive cohorts of graduate students have earned it an international reputation for nurturing the brightest talent in this rapidly expanding field. Among its research priorities are the evolutionary origins of music, and the relationship between music and language as parallel and closely interconnected systems of communication. Work in the latter area has been greatly enhanced through the arrival at the Centre of Sarah Hawkins, whose work in speech perception and acoustic phonetics has an international reputation and complements Ian Cross’s work on music and cognition.

Our other Centre, funded through a grant of approximately £2m from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is the Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP), directed by John Rink. CMPCP carries out a wide range of research on musical performance, collaborating with King’s College London, the University of Oxford, Royal Holloway, the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. It has a particular remit to build bridges between academics and performers, and is the linchpin of our strategy to maximise the synergy between the Faculty and Cambridge’s unique environment of student and professional music-making. CMPCP’s work is enabling us to strengthen our links not only with our three resident ensembles (the Academy of Ancient Music, Britten Sinfonia and Endellion String Quartet) but also with the Cambridge University Music Society.

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In addition, it gives the Faculty a stake in the increasingly topical area of creativity research, a field in which we have doctoral, postdoctoral and staff researchers.

When a community of researchers reaches a certain critical mass, everything starts connecting to everything else. While John Rink’s and Nicholas Cook’s work in performance studies links to CMS research on creativity and empirical approaches, CMPCP equally provides a focus for colleagues working on historical performance as scholars and practitioners. Again, CMPCP researchers are carrying out ethnographical studies of musical performance, which links with the work of our ethnomusicologists (Ruth Davis as well as graduate and postdoctoral researchers). A major focus of our ethnomusicologists is the broadly political role of music, for example in nation building, and this establishes links with Iain Fenlon’s work on the role of music in the highly politicised contexts of 16th-century Italian city states, and with Marina FrolovaWalker’s work on music in the Soviet Union. There is another link with ethnomusicology in Ben Walton’s work on opera in 19th-century South America, while the Faculty’s continued emphasis on opera from the 16th to the 20th centuries links back to performance: the study of opera is as much a study of performances as of texts.

And while the study of music as performance links empirical and ethnographical work with a range of analytical, historical and practical perspectives (Martin Ennis, Andrew Jones, Nicholas Marston, David Skinner, Geoffrey Webber and Edward Wickham), as well as with composition (Robin Holloway, John Hopkins and Jeremy Thurlow), the Faculty is also making fundamental contributions to the study of music as text: our medievalists (Susan Rankin and Sam Barrett, though Sam is also completing a book on Miles Davis) are focusing on the complex practical, cultural and religious contexts in which music first came to be written down, which links

with Stefano Castelvecchi’s work on issues of genre and textuality in 19thcentury opera – and of course the nature and function of the musical text is a central concern of performance studies. These areas feature prominently in the work of our graduate students as well as the postdoctoral researchers who contribute so much to the larger research culture of which the Faculty is the focus.

Faculty research ranges from the traditional model of the lone scholar to large-scale collaborative projects involving externally funded research assistants (as in the case of CMPCP, which has five RAs all told). A steady stream of research funding is vital for the well-being of our research environment as a whole, not just for the projects that directly benefit from it.

A key element of our research strategy is therefore putting the necessary support in place to encourage more and better funding applications: recent successes include Matthew Pritchard’s British Academy-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship, Juniper Hill’s Marie Curie Fellowship to work on social dimensions of creativity, John Rink’s research grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Online Chopin Variorum Edition, and the Leverhulme Trust’s funding for Marina Frolova-Walker to spend two years in Moscow investigating the workings of the Stalin Prize Committee (1940–53). Recognition of our research during this period has included Ruth Davis’s Fellowship in Sacred Music, Worship and the Arts at Yale University’s Institite for Sacred Music; Susan Rankin’s election to the British Academy and Academy of Europe; Nicholas Cook’s election to the Academy of Europe and receipt of the 2010 Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory; and the 2009 Einstein Award bestowed by the American Musicological Society on David Trippett, who holds a junior Research Fellowship at Christ’s College.

Visit www.mus.cam.ac.uk/research for further information on the Faculty’s research, and www.mus.cam.ac.uk/ research/recent-publications for details of some recent publications.

Time Flies PhD student Michelle Phillips was one of five young scholars accepted for a nineweek residency at the Science Museum in London, as part of the ‘Live Science’ project.

Between 17 January and 17 March 2011, 886 museum visitors took part in a series of experiments designed to explore how music affects people’s sense of passing time. Listeners were played a piece of music lasting between 19 and 46 seconds, and asked how long it lasted. The music was varied in a number of ways – for instance in tempo, pitch, and volume – and subjects were asked to do different things while they listened. Michelle is still analysing the data, but early indications are that the most important factors affecting people’s experience of time are age (older listeners think music lasts longer) and musical experience (listeners who don’t play an instrument think the same). It also seems that the more identifiable events there are within the music, the longer it is perceived as lasting.

Anna Pensaert Q&A music pilot project, I am working to bring the two Departments closer together.

What is your job title?

Head of Music Collections at the Pendlebury Library of Music and University Library Music Department.

For how long have you held this role?

I have been in this joint role since April 2010, but started as Pendlebury Librarian in January 2004.

What does your job involve?

I run the Music Departments of both the University and the Pendlebury Libraries and, as part of a three-year

I divide my time between the two libraries, so I have to plan ahead, making sure I organise my work as much as possible around where I will be. Having said that, I have to be prepared to go to both sites in the course of the day when needed, so my handbag is always full of keys.

My work day invariably begins with emails – loads of them. Their volume has doubled over the last year and they cover a broad range of subjects, from meeting arrangements to student queries and offers of donations. I try to make time for informal catch-up sessions with colleagues, over tea and biscuits if I can.

A large proportion of my energy is focused on the library users – both students and academic staff. We need to make sure that we are aware of and able to respond to their needs. The rest of my time is divided between administration – budgeting, acquisitions and policies – and looking after the collections.

How many other people do you work with?

Six. One Deputy Head of Music, who also works in both locations, plus three team members at the UL and two at the Pendlebury.

Why did you become a music librarian?

During my music studies I became a dedicated library user and discovered I was almost as fascinated by the process of discovering information and how it was organised as I was with the subject I was studying.

How has your job evolved over the time you have worked here?

The biggest change is the new structure that brings together the University and Pendlebury Libraries. Apart from that, developments in electronic resources and technologies are constantly changing the way libraries work.

What aspect of your role do you enjoy the most?

The diversity of the post. I love dealing with people as well as with collections and information technology, and all this in a music context. It’s just perfect.

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Reaching beyond the University

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uth Hardie joined the Faculty as Music Outreach Officer in 2009 and, not long after, the Cambridge Music Education Outreach Group (CaMEO) was established. Through these initiatives the Faculty is seeking to make a positive impact on music and education beyond the University. With two clear strands of outreach activity, one focusing on local community engagement and the other on widening access to higher education, we are committed to sharing resources and expertise with the public while helping our students develop valuable skills and experience for their futures.

The scope of our outreach work is already extensive and continues to develop, with 152 volunteers contributing more than 1,200 hours of time to CaMEO projects over the past 18 months alone. This year, our widening-access strand has given 150 Year 12 students the opportunity to experience life at Cambridge for themselves, with sample lectures delivered by our academic staff and practical sessions run by our undergraduates. One of our priorities has been to improve the guidance available to prospective students so they are well informed and prepared 6

for university life, regardless of background: we have provided extra help this year through an e-mentor scheme that links students in schools from all over the country with our own students. New opportunities for gifted and talented students in Years 9, 10 and 11, run in conjunction with our resident ensembles, have also been very successful. Britten Sinfonia has supported a masterclass for wind players, while Stephen Montague, New Music Associate at Kettle’s Yard, has put on two masterclasses for composers.

Alongside these projects we have been running school information sessions, parent-and-teacher talks, a week-long residential summer school, and one-off experience days for particularly underrepresented groups, such as children in care and ethnic minority groups. All these events aim to give prospective students and their supporters clear information about Cambridge and an accurate impression of higher education more generally.

It is our current students who are most involved in community engagement activities, and the strength of these projects is that they are driven by student interests and ideas. In Lent Term alone, the Opera Society embarked on an education project delivering opera

workshops to 60 secondary school pupils, culminating in a performance of The Marriage of Figaro; the Collegium Musicum delivered a workshop and an instrument show-and-tell session for primary school children and their families based on their performances of Bach’s B minor Mass; and the New Music Ensemble delivered interactive workshops focused on some of their concerts, along with question-and-answer sessions with their composers. Students have given regular performances in Addenbrooke’s and Fulbourn hospitals, and they have also helped run community workshop sessions and singing projects in local community centres, in out-of-school clubs and with elderly action groups.

The highlights of the outreach programme over the last two years must be the projects run as part of the University Festivals. For the 2009 Festival of Ideas, CaMEO ran a touring Gamelan workshop bus: this delivered 31 workshops to 430 children over five days, as well as two traditional Javanese Wayangs (puppet theatre shows), one for schools and one for the public. And as part of the 2009 Science Festival, CaMEO and the Faculty’s Centre for Music and Science staged an interactive show called Good Vibrations: this

© Sir Cam

explored the relationship between music and maths, and was so successful that it was repeated at this year’s Festival. In 2010 our projects were even more ambitious. The specially written Young Person’s Guide to Percussion, complete with narrator and chamber orchestra, was performed for 450 primary school children; a fugal mass for three choirs accompanied by two gamelan orchestras was performed alongside school compositions at King’s College Chapel to a sell-out audience; and Bonesong, an opera written by two of our most enthusiastic outreach students, was workshopped in schools around Cambridge and then performed in the basement of the University’s Museum of Zoology as part of an Electronic Opera Club night.

These are examples of an inspirational new facet of the Faculty’s work, and with our students’ growing dedication and enthusiasm for outreach activities we are confident that bigger and better opportunities lie ahead.

Images, left to right: Junk Music Workshop; B Minor Mass Workshop with the Collegium Musicum and Girton Glebe Primary School; Performing in Hospitals; Good Vibrations (Science Festival 2011); Carmen Elektra: Opera Underground (Festival of Ideas 2010) 7

Staff Biographies Sam Barrett (Pembroke) specialises in early medieval Latin song, the transmission of early medieval music, and jazz.

Iain Fenlon (King’s) works on European music from 1450 to 1650, Monteverdi, and codicology, with a special interest in music and society.

Susan Rankin (Emmanuel) works in source studies, medieval chant and early polyphony. She has published facsimiles of 10th- and 11th-century manuscripts.

Stefano Castelvecchi (St John’s) has published critical editions of works by Rossini and Verdi, and various articles on 18th- and 19th-century Italian opera.

Marina Frolova-Walker (Clare) works on 19th- and 20th-century Russian music. She is about to take up a Leverhulme-funded fellowship to research the Stalin Prize.

John Rink (St John’s) specialises in performance studies, analysis, 19thcentury studies and digital musicology.

He is the Director of CMPCP.

Nicholas Cook (Darwin) took up the 1684 Professorship in 2009.

He is currently working on musical performance, multimedia, and crosscultural interaction.

Ian Cross (Wolfson) is Director of the Faculty’s Centre for Music and Science.

He specialises in music and science, music cognition, and psychoacoustics.

Ruth Davis (Corpus) is an ethnomusicologist, working in particular on the music of North Africa, the Middle East and the wider Mediterranean.

Martin Ennis (Girton) specialises in the analysis of 19th-century German music, particularly Brahms. He is currently Chairman of the Faculty Board.

Margaret Faultless (Girton) is Director of Performance Studies. Coleader of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, her specialism is performance practice.

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Sarah Hawkins is Director of Research in Speech and Music Science. She has broad interests in how humans communicate using sound-based systems.

Robin Holloway (Gonville and Caius) specialises in composition and in European music from 1850 to the present day. He retires from the Faculty at the end of this academic year.

John Hopkins (Homerton) is Coordinator of Practice-Based Studies. He is a composer, with a range of research interests in contemporary music.

David Skinner (Sidney Sussex) is known primarily for his combined role as a researcher and performer of early music.

Jeremy Thurlow (Robinson) is a composer. His research interests include analysis, in particular of 19th- and 20thcentury music.

Benjamin Walton (Jesus) works on a wide range of topics in 19th- and 20th-century opera. He has particular interests in cultural history.

Andrew Jones (Selwyn) specialises in 17th- and 18th-century music, Handel, and performance practice.

Geoffrey Webber (Gonville and Caius) is Director of the newly introduced Master’s degree in Choral Studies. His specialisms include 17th-century music and church music.

Nicholas Marston (King’s) is a theorist and analyst with particular expertise in Schenkerian analysis. He also works on Beethoven and Schumann.

Edward Wickham (St Catharine’s) works on late medieval and renaissance music. He combines his Cambridge duties with the direction of The Clerks.

We are now able to announce the names of those appointed to the two new lectureships mentioned elsewhere in the newsletter. They are Monique Ingalls (Mellon lectureship) and David Trippett (temporary lectureship). We look forward very much to welcoming them to the Faculty in due course.