The Centre for Contemporary Music Cultures (CCMC)
Department of Music, Goldsmiths, University of London
Directors: Keith Negus, Professor of Musicology and Roger Redgate, Reader in Composition
The activities of the CCMC embrace all types of contemporary music making with the aim of fostering a broad and inclusive approach to research methodologies, interpretative positions, analytical techniques, creative strategies and performance practices. The CCMC seeks to facilitate and encourage dialogue between theorists, performers and composers/ songwriters/ producers. The work of the CCMC is particularly concerned with scholarship, composition and performance that challenges or moves across conventional boundaries and categories.
Following its launch in October 2005, and under the directorship of Professor John Baily, the CCMC developed an innovative research agenda by prioritising activities that emphasised movements across the categories of western art music, world music and popular music. Having become directors of the Centre during the summer of 2008, we are now building upon the foundations established by John and extending this agenda to think about how various musical styles and musicians bridge, blur and make connections to other art forms and cultural practices. For example we wish to encourage consideration of the practices and ideas that bring together music and architecture; music and moving images; music and drama; music and dance; music and visual art; music and noise, to name just a few. At the same time, we want the CCMC to provide an intellectual and creative space within which art music, popular music and world musics can be given attention on their own terms (regardless of the ways they may or might not connect with other musics, art forms and cultural practices).
We are in the process of setting up a range of activities and events for 2009 and into 2010. The Centre will be concentrating activities in the following areas:
- Composition, Culture, and Politics
- Exploring Popular Song
- Microtonal Musics
Music, Architecture and Space
Music and Money
Musicians and their Audiences
Notation, Improvisation and Physicality
Music and Image
Current activities include the following:
Composition, Culture, Politics
For series one, 2008-09, the CCMC has joined forces with the Centre for Russian Music in a series of talks and performances focused on the work of Russian/Post-Soviet composers, exploring the impact of political change from different perspectives and cultural positions, highlighting radically different aesthetic viewpoints. Through the influence or rejection of mainstream European composition and popular music idioms, or via a return to traditional religious and folk elements, Post-Soviet music has forged its own, sometimes surprising, set of aesthetic controversies. This series of performances and talks features the work of composers from former Soviet countries, composers who remained and developed their work in Russia, and Russian composers based in the UK.
In 2009 series two will be extended to cover a wider range of work focussing on composers based in the UK. The first seminar in this series will feature Michael Finnissy talking about his work and start at 5.30 on Tuesday March 10th, room to be announced.
Music and Image Series One
This series will focus on the relationship between music and the visual image in all its facets ranging from film and the moving image, to painting and poetry as parallel forms of notation and creative expression. The first event in the series will be a presentation and discussion with the solo and collaborative poet, sound/graphic artist and performer, Lawrence Upton who is an AHRC Creative Research Fellow in the Music Department. The presentation, entitled Self, Expression, will be held on Tuesday February 10th, room to be announced.
Exploring the Popular Song
This programme will present a range of critical and creative approaches to the popular song, interrogating debates in musicology, whilst encouraging dialogues between theory, songwriting and performance. The first seminar will be held on Tuesday 24 February, 5.30 – 7pm, room 268. It will feature Dave Laing giving a talk entitled ‘Words of Love’. The respondent will be songwriter Pete Astor.
Further events will be announced in due course.
Contacts: Keith Negus k.negus (@gold.ac.uk) Roger Redgate r.redgate (@gold.ac.uk).