College of Arts & Humanities

RMA Research Colloquia in Music

College of Arts School of Culture & Creative Arts
Date: Wednesday 27 January 2021 - Wednesday 24 March 2021
Time: 17:15 - 18:30
Venue: Zoom
Category: Concerts and music, Social events, Academic events
Speaker: Varied
Website: www.gla.ac.uk/subjects/music/events/rmaresearchcolloquiainmusic/

Music hosts a series of colloquia on behalf of the Royal Musical Association featuring national and international guest speakers, along with staff and postgraduate students. Sessions are open to the public, and a warm welcome extended to all.

Sessions run from 17:15 on a Wednesday evening unless noted otherwise and are hosted via Zoom for the time being.

Please email Andy Bull to book your space.

SEMESTER 1 SESSIONS

Wednesday 27 January
Dr Inja Stanović - University of Huddersfield
Performing, Recording and (Re)constructing: a guide for historically-informed performance

Wednesday 10 February
Professor Bethany Klein - University of Leeds
Popular Music as Art, Entertainment and Commerce

Wednesday 10 March
Dr Ellis Jones
Spotify, Novello, and the moral economy of ‘cheap music’

This work-in-progress paper explores the contemporary moral economy of Spotify through a historical comparison with Novello & Co, a sheet-music publishing firm founded in London in 1811. Novello & Co were instrumental in creating a popular market for their newly affordable music commodity in the mid-19th century; indeed, their self-published company history is entitled ‘A Short History of Cheap Music’ (Bennett, 1887). This striking text forms the basis of my account, with the phrase ’cheap music’ forming a bridge by which I connect Novello & Co to Spotify’s alleged devaluing of music and musical work.

Novello’s pursuit of cheap music offers important context for three of the most common critiques aimed at Spotify today. These critiques are 1) Spotify divides its income unfairly, 2) Spotify isn’t a music company (and therefore doesn’t understand or care about musicians), and 3) Spotify’s payment system lacks transparency. I will suggest that Novello’s discursive emphasis on the social good might valuably inform the kinds of normative claims we make about Spotify and the music streaming economy more broadly.

Tuesday 16 March *13:00 - 14:00*
Dr Eleni Ikoniadou
For many voices

The voice can assume almost any shape,
sculpted both by human body and technology but reducible to neither.

This talk will follow the voice in its
capacity to channel the alien and open up a door to the otherworldly.

Wednesday 24 March
Dr Anna Bull - University of Portsmouth
‘Getting it right’: Classical music as a middle-class social practice

In this talk, I draw on my recently published book, ‘Class, Control, and Classical Music’ (Oxford University Press, 2019), to discuss why, in the UK, classical music remains predominantly played by white middle-class people. I draw on data from an ethnographic study with young people playing in classical music ensembles in the south of England to explain how the inclusions and exclusions that are visible today were set up historically in the establishment of music education institutions in the late Victoria period. The link between class and classical music is also apparent in the ways in which classical music indexes middle-class respectability for young women; and in the social relations of classical music pedagogy, such as what I am calling a ‘pedagogy of correction’. These social relations are not, I argue, separate from the music itself, but are in part formed by the demands of classical music’s distinctive aesthetic, repertoire, and instruments. These demands create an aesthetic ideal of ‘getting it right’. This means that in order to change the demographic patterns of who plays classical music, the aesthetic itself will need to change.

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