Subjects A-Z: Music

Research Colloquia in Music

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.

All talks take place in-person, in various venues on the Gilmorehill campus (see the University campus map for detailed directions) .  All sessions are free and open to the public and a warm welcome is extended to all.

2025–26 Semester 1 — Wednesdays at 4.15pm (unless stated otherwise)

Wed 22^nd October, 4:15pm — University Concert Hall
Haydée Schvartz (Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Cramb Residency University of Glasgow)
Interpreting Contemporary Piano Music: A Conversation with Haydee Schvartz

Prof. Björn Heile and Dr. Vera Wolkowicz will host a conversation with Argentine pianist Haydée Schvartz, a specialist in contemporary music, and part of this year’s Cramb Residency at the University of Glasgow. The discussion will explore themes such as the musical score’s attempt to capture the abstract language of music through systems of notation and interpretation. Key questions to be addressed include: What does a score truly depict? Is it a representation of the composition itself, or a guide for its performance?

Schvartz will also reflect on the unique insights and artistic experiences that emerge from close collaboration with composers, drawing on her extensive career as both a pianist and music director of a new music ensemble.

Finally, she will introduce the programme she will perform on Thursday, focusing on the International Piano Tango Collection—a project initiated by American pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, of which she is now one of the artistic heirs. Mikhashoff commissioned over a hundred composers from around the world to create piano works inspired by tango.
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Haydée Schvartz is a renowned Argentinian pianist and educator who began playing the piano at the age of four and has been performing and recording internationally since the 1990s. Her repertoire spans new music, classical, and chamber music. She studied piano in Buffalo with Yvar Mikhashoff on a Fulbright Scholarship for her master’s degree, and also studied in London with Maria Curcio.  Alongside her solo work, she has performed with both Argentinian and international orchestras and collaborated with composers from around the world, premiering numerous works—many written specifically for her.

Tue 4^th November, 5.15pm — Room 237C, ARC
Adriana Minu (University of Glasgow)

Wed 12^th November, 4:15pm — Room 118, Hetherington Building
Dr Inna Lisniak (Estonian Literary Museum)
Decolonisation of Musical Heritage through Contemporary Performance Practices in Ukraine and Estonia (comparative analysis)

This study examines how contemporary performers of vocal-instrumental traditions – kobza and bandura players in Ukraine and kannel players in Estonia – are recovering and reinterpreting their musical heritage as a way of decolonising the past. These practices are deeply rooted in the historical contexts of both cultures and serve as key markers of identity. Under Soviet cultural policies of standardisation, unification, and ideological control, traditional performance practices underwent significant transformations (Kencis, Bronner, Seljamaa, eds., Folklore and Ethnology in the Soviet Western Borderlands, 2024). The paper focuses on how, after independence, new generations of Ukrainian and Estonian musicians reinterpret traditional music to restore cultural memory and affirm national identity. This study continues my previous research (Lisniak 2025a, 2025b). I examine how performers experiment with oral traditions and archival sources, what musical styles they use, what new artistic forms they create, how they reinterpret folk instruments, and how they combine traditional melodies with their own creativity. The methodology combines comparative analysis of Ukrainian and Estonian approaches, historical analysis of the Soviet period, musicological study of repertoire and arrangements, interviews to capture performers’ experiences with folk material, and computer-assisted methods such as visualisation to deepen insights.

The findings show that contemporary Ukrainian and Estonian performers of stringed-plucked instruments – kobzar, bandurа players, and kannel players – share certain performance styles (I identify four) but apply different strategies when engaging with folklore sources. In doing so, they articulate a conscious departure from the colonial past and position themselves within a broader European cultural context.

This topic is particularly important for rethinking and reassessing the concepts of ‘traditional folklore’ and ‘traditional practice’, which were distorted, unified, and standardised by Soviet cultural propaganda. A deeper exploration of the decolonisation of cultural memory through performance practices allows for the restoration of historical justice, the revival of suppressed traditions, and the re-establishment of cultural continuity, which is vital for the formation of national identity. Comparative analysis shows that in Estonia, the re-evaluation of traditional musical folklore began immediately after the re-establishment of independence (1991) and integration into the European context. In Ukraine, however, the active decolonisation of Soviet narratives in all spheres, including musical and traditional practices, music started only after 2014, with the onset of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Estonian experience of decolonisation, therefore, offers valuable insights for Ukraine.

My future research will pursue two directions. The first concerns the continuation of Ukrainian-Estonian music studies within an interdisciplinary framework, with the potential to expand into a broader Eastern European and Baltic perspective. The second focuses on the rapidly developing field of computational ethno/musicology, particularly the digitisation and  corpus-based analysis of Ukrainian folk songs, including the advancement of a large-scale symbolic corpus.
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Inna Lisniak, PhD in Musical Art, is a Ukrainian musicologist and ethnomusicologist. She works as a Senior Research Fellow at the Estonian Literary Museum and Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology of the M. Rylsky Institute of Art, Folklore Studies and Ethnology, NAS of Ukraine. She is the author of the monograph ‘Academic Bandura Art at the End of the 20th – Beginning of the 21st Century as a Reflection of Contemporary Musical Culture Trends’ (Kyiv, 2019). Contributions to volumes II–VI of the ‘Ukrainian Music Encyclopedia’ – including service as executive secretary of volume VI (2023) – are complemented by a wide range of scholarly articles and collective monograph chapters, as well as editorial work on the popular science essays ‘Musical Culture of Crimea and Donbas’ (Kyiv, 2021).

Wed 19^th November, 4:15pm — Room 118, Hetherington Building
Dr Reuben Phillips (University of Oxford)
Brahms’s Library: A Musical and Material History

Housed today in the archive of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the collection of books, manuscripts and printed music that belonged to the composer Johannes Brahms has a multifaceted music-historical significance. As is widely acknowledged, the library offers insights into Brahms’s cultural and musical world. The collection is also important for the documentary heritage of Western art music more generally: to be found here, in addition to Brahms’s own works, are nineteenth-century complete editions and miniature scores, historical music treatises, as well as autograph manuscripts from earlier composers, particularly those within the Austro-Germanic musical canon. In this talk I reflect on the life of Brahms’s library both before and after the composer’s death in 1897. This will involve consideration of Brahms’s annotations and collecting practices and also the curious ways in which his private collection has been brought into public view over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
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Reuben Phillips is a postdoctoral researcher supported by a grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and currently serves as a tutor in music analysis at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from Princeton University and subsequently held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Reuben is co-editor of the volume Rethinking Brahms (Oxford University Press); his articles are published in the Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Musical Quarterly.