Music Department Inaugural Professorial Lectures
Wed, 09 Apr 2014 10:11:00 BST
“Embracing Cross-Pollination in Mixed Music: a Systemic Approach to its Composition, Performanceand Technique” was the title of Professor Pierre Alexandre Tremblay's lecture which took place on Wednesday 19 March in the Diamond Jubilee Lecture Theatre.
During his lecture, Professor Tremblay demonstrated first how the praxis of this techno-fluent generation allowed crosspollination of roles historically practiced by different agents, and then how this systemic approach pushed further the limits of the language of mixed music, bringing new problems and challenges.
The lecture illustrated the consequences of this approach, starting from an overview of the question of composition as research, whilst making explicit the biases of this contemporary trend. Then he demonstrated their consequences, from aesthetic decisions to transferable technical tools, and further demonstrated the potential influence of this work to a much wider context than chamber music with electronics.
Pierre Alexandre Tremblay is a composer and an improviser on bass guitar and sound processing devices, soloist and within the groups “ars circa musicae” (Paris, France), “de type inconnu” (Montréal, Québec), and “Splice” (London, UK). He is also Co-Artistic Director of the Electric Spring Festival. Held annually at the University, this festival embraces the full width of electronic music today.
The second lecture given by Professor Deborah Mawer on Thursday 3 April in the Phipps Concert Hall. It was entitled “When French Music Meets Jazz: Intertextuality and borrowing in music by Ravel and Bill Evans”.
The lecture was centred on broad-based theories of intertextuality (listener-centred), as well as more specific notions of cultural borrowing (composer-centred). Deborah presented two case studies with a focus upon instrumental repertoire. The first looked at Ravel’s theory and practice of the ‘Blues’, especially in his well-known Violin Sonata (1923–27). The second considered resonances of Ravel (together with Chopin, as an adoptive Frenchman) and even parallels with Messiaen in exquisite music from 1958–59 by the American modal jazz improviser and pianist, Bill Evans.
Deborah Mawer’s main publications are on 20th Century French music, with her fifth book, French Music and Jazz in Conversation, 1900–1965: From Debussy to Brubeck (Cambridge University Press), to be launched this year. She is a founder and former Vice-President of the Society for Music Analysis and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She also has long-standing interests in education, as a member of the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Music Education, and as a National Teaching Fellow.
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