Projects

Rhythm Changes is a 3-year trans-national research programme led by Professor Tony Whyton which examines the nature of jazz cultures in 5 European countries. Commencing in 2010 and running until summer 2013, Rhythm Changes involves a team of 13 researchers working across 7 universities in the UK, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway. Project partners include the Universities of Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Music and Performing Arts Graz and Stavanger as well as the Birmingham City and Lancaster in the UK. Specifically, Rhythm Changes will:

   1. Investigate the concepts of national thought and identity in jazz using international comparison. Rhythm Changes will break new ground by presenting a trans-national view of jazz as an exchange of ideas and inspirations, and the way national movements in one country both influence, and are influenced by, developments from abroad.  The project will:
   2. Collate jazz-related data, including relevant research, performance projects, interviews, and cultural policies, from 5 key countries in Europe, and from various disciplines, and will move from specialist analysis towards interdisciplinary and trans-national synthesis.
   3. Study national identities, representations and stereotypes in jazz. The project will investigate the development of national jazz identities as a constant interaction between a nation’s self-image and its view of others.
   4. Examine the interaction between cultural memory, arts and tourism by showing how jazz venues and festivals preserve, reflect and inform a sense of cultural memory.
   5. Further pan-European humanities research by establishing networks that encourage trans-national co-operation, collaborations and the work of early career researchers.
   6. Implement a programme of targeted dissemination activities which communicate findings to a trans-national audience of relevant policy makers, academia and the public
 
As a research project, Rhythm Changes is the largest award received for jazz studies in Europe and has broken new ground in terms of developing interdisciplinary methods for musical enquiry. For further information visit: www.rhythmchanges.net or contact Professor Tony Whyton

This project seeks to promote a heightened awareness of acoustic communication within urban environments and contexts. This will be achieved through international mobility and creative collaboration focused upon the listening to the sound-landscape (soundscape). Listening to city sounds in movement will be the project’s departure point: the study of sonic perspective in an urban and social context in continuous change, tightly allied to pertinent spatial and cultural contexts. How does a city’s soundscape and its ‘soundmarks’ evolve? Inevitably touching upon the question as to how does an urban context of affiliation develop over time and in relation to its location to other European geographical areas?
 
The project partners are: Tempo Reale (Italy); The Directorate of Music, the University of Salford (UK); Groupe de Musique Vivantes Lyon (France); Alte Schmiede (Vienna, Austria) and the Electroacoustic Music Research and Applications Laboratory of the Ionian University Corfu, (Greece) all in their way leaders in digital music composition and performance research. The fruits of the collaboration will include:
 

• Discussion and educational events on the profound significance of sound/landscapes
• Presentations and listening to sound contexts from different cities realized by sound-artists from across Europe
• Realization of sound installations to investigate the relationship between sound and architectural spaces from urban contexts
• Realization of a collective thematic artistic production integrating different experiences and creative sensibilities
  

Listening Cities commenced in October 2011 and will run for 2 years. The opening event was delivered in Florence where work by members of staff from the Directorate of music was presented. The University of Salford will host the Listening Cities project event during April 2012 at MediaCity.  For further information contact Professor Stephen Davismoon

Dr Robin Dewhurst is currently working as a Co-investigator for an AHRC Translating Cultures project entitled 'Translating Performance', working in partnership with the University of Sheffield and other arts organisations. The aim of the research is to collaborate with arts festivals in challenging notions of audience and performer within musical performances which translate diaspora and refugee cultural experience. In so doing the project hopes to highlight the importance of research in contributing not only practically to arts festival programming and practices, but to the broader, international cultural landscape to which the Translating Cultures theme addresses. In doing so, the project will have nurtured significant new partnerships between the participating HEIs, the arts festival sector (Sensoria and Tramlines), and local and national refugee organisations (Arts on the Run, Platforma and Refugee Week) in addition to aiding and promoting an early career researcher. From a disciplinary perspective, the research will have directly networked academics from English, Music, Modern Languages and Journalism while remaining relevant to broader inter-disciplinary concerns of translation, intercultural communication, performance, diaspora and youth culture. It will have had significant public engagement and media impact and will have indirectly supported the associated AHRC research programme of Diasporas, Migration and Identity. Its specific objectives are:
 
   1. To run a series of events translating and commenting on refugee experience as the basis of a collaborative ethnographic  study.
   2. To document and further encourage audience/performer documentation of these events in a range of media.
   3. To use this work as the basis for cross-disciplinary analysis by researchers.
   4. To develop new collaborations between arts organisations, refugee agencies and HEIs in which all partners learn from the exchange.
   5. To create opportunities for public engagement over the issues addressed by the research.
   6. To intervene in the wider debate on the public presentation and curation of refugee arts.
 
The seven performances held within the research project all have specific aims. Three performances are participatory music workshops based on Zimbabwean Shona practices. These workshop performances are situated in each of the three festivals and are based around the 'audience' joining in on their own or supplied instruments to a core group of musicians playing a simple percussive theme.

These events aim to destabilise notions of participant/audience and refugee/non-refugee from which the other four performances can anchor their more explicit translations of refugee experience. The first of these is a Sanctuary Worldbeat Session in a publicly accessible studio at which refugee musicians collaborate with a world music big band, a therapist/lyricist and a vinyl archivist of relevant recordings from the developing world in writing and recording a new song. The process will be filmed.

This event builds on a pilot event held by Arts on the Run in 2011 which in this case will result in the digital and vinyl publication of a single. The film and the song will be launched during the Refugee Week event, followed by a performance of the big band and refugee guests, before the second Shona inspired performance. The Sanctuary Worldbeat Session and subsequent performance directly address the translation of experience into music and its subsequent digital and physical mediation.

The link between vinyl, archival work and performance is further made explicit in the sixth event, a showing of an Alan Lomax film followed by a performance of Sheffield-based musicians. The seventh event (see Section 4 for chronology) is a screening of a film, Imshuradj, by Libyan asylum seeker Akli Sh'kka, then a talk, followed by a performance by Danto Aiyya, a Tuareg musician. The film explicitly addresses the role of language and the whole event emphasises the theme of translating refugee experience in varied media. This film, along with the Sanctuary Worldbeat film, will also be accessible from the project website, which will be a participatory portal and archive of all events. For further information contact Dr Robin Dewhurst

In 2011, the music directorate appointed internationally renowned contemporary music group Psappha as University of Salford Media City Ensemble. This partnership will create world leading practice based research, linking new technology with contemporary music performance. One of the first projects involves Masters' students from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, staff from Acoustics and Music in the University of Salford, an Psappha to create a unique digital staging of Eight Songs for a Mad King, a ground-breaking music theatre piece by Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. For further information contact Professor Alan Williams

SMRC Director Professor Tony Whyton is currently working in partnership with the Humanities in the European Research Area, AHRC, Serious London Jazz Festival and Kings Place to develop a HERA festival in 2013. The event, which will take place between 30 May and 1 June 2013, will feature performances, commissions, workshops and events that highlight the work of HERA-funded projects and celebrate the impact of the humanities on everyday life.   For further information contact Professor Tony Whyton

During January and February 2012, the Music Directorate is received several visitors from our research partners in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil (UNIRIO). Dr Marcos Lucas, a composer whose work has been performed by the London Sinfonietta, and numerous ensembles world-wide, is visiting us on a CAPES (Brazilian state)-funded Postdoctoral research fellowship to work with Dr Alan Williams on an opera to be performed in Media City later this year. Fellow academics from UNIRIO Sergio Barrenechea, Lucia Barreneche and Hugo Pilger present rarely-heard works by Brazilian composer Francisco Mignone, a contemporary of Villa Lobos.  For further information contact Professor Alan Williams

Professor Peter Graham recently collaborated with award winning author Alexander McCall Smith on a musical portrayal of characters from McCall Smiths’ 44 Scotland Street series. McCall Smith provided a narrative which actor Alasdair Nicholson performed with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Symphonic Wind Orchestra, directed by Nigel Boddice. The live concert performance was released on CD by Nimbus Records. For further information contact Professor Peter Graham

In December 2009, the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Singers and Salford Choral Society gave the premiere of Alan Williams’ Wonder: a Scientific Oratorio. This piece was specially commissioned as part of the International Astronomical Union’s International Year of Astronomy, and was a collaboration with the Joddrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. Its libretto, written by prizewinning playwright Philip Goulding, used contemporary knowledge of cosmology to create a contemporary answer to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation on the bicentenary of the composer’s death. Wonder was supported by a Leverhulme grant and the Arts Council. For further information contact Professor Alan Williams