The songs of Pedro Ximénez Abril Y Tirado (1784–1856): Poetry and Art Music in Postcolonial Bolivia

Tuesday 22 September, 2pm

Pedro Ximénez Abril y Tirado (1784-1856) was one of Latin America’s most successful and prolific composers of the early 19th century. He exemplifies the cultural syncretism that has been a prevailing feature of Latin American music at many historical junctures. At a time when the impetus to de-privilege the European classical canon grows ever stronger, Ximénez is a neglected composer of the highest quality whose works deserve wide contemporary exposure and integration into the corpus of established art songs.  

This online seminar will be the launch event for a Guildhall School project to make the first professional recordings, public concerts, and performing edition of a selection of Tirado’s songs from the several hundred manuscripts held in the National Library of Bolivia, Sucre. In addition to introducing the project, it will present first example recordings of two contrasting songs.

Event co-hosted by The Institute of Latin American Studies (School of Advanced Studies, University of London) and Guildhall School of Music & Drama, under the Open World Research Initiative (OWRI) of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Panellists will include:

• Rafael Montero (freelance singer and project leader)
• Nigel Foster (freelance keyboard player)
• Dr José Manuel Izquierdo König (musicologist and author of doctoral dissertation on Tirado)
• Juan Conrado Quinquiví Morón (musician and transcriber of the songs)
• Professor Sir Barry Ife (scholar of Hispanic culture and music)

Seminar convened by Professor John Sloboda (Guildhall School of Music & Drama)

Chair – Dr David Irving, ICREA Research Professor at Institució Milà i Fontanals (CSIC - IMF) Barcelona, Spain

This will be an online live-streamed seminar, hosted on Zoom. It will not be recorded but a written summary of the main issues raised during the seminar will be circulated.

Insiders/Outsiders: Improvising Musicians’ Reflections on Locating their Doctoral Studies in London Culture

Monday 12 October, 6pm

Ed Rice (Guildhall School)
Shirley Smart (Royal College of Music & City University)
Scott Stroman (Guildhall School)

The improvising musician’s career often comprises numerous activities, at once distinct but interrelated. These activities might include performing, composing and teaching at various levels, with different emphases on each varying from person to person. All of these elements could be described as supported and informed by a continuous search to define and advance one’s own creative voice, an endless process that can take inspiration from a range of sources.

Artists can occupy themselves with finding brand-new ways to express themselves, perhaps rooting their output within an existing musical tradition and learning to communicate using its language. They may aspire to find a sound that assimilates elements of their background – for example their lived experience growing up in a particular tradition – or a musical culture they have adopted or feel a particular affinity with, or a combination of these.

What impact can location have on an improvising musician’s output? Do they identify as a member of one or more particular scenes or communities? How might this apply to London-based artists whose specialisms have roots or origins elsewhere in the world? It is this process of looking inward and outward at the same time, rooting oneself within a musical culture while attempting to forge a personal identity within it, that forms the basis for this discussion.

This Research Works event will feature presentations and an open discussion on these themes between three London-based improvising performers and educators who are active in wide range of disciplines. All three are current doctoral students, from a combination of Guildhall School and City University.

Displaced Voices: Giving Voice Through Orchestral Composition

Monday 19 October, 6pm

Presented in association with the Institute for Social Impact Research in the Performing Arts

Dr Toby Young (Guildhall School) in conversation with Dr Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey (University of Oxford)

Displaced Voices (2019) was an Arts Council-funded participatory music-making project that employed innovative orchestral practice to give voice to refugee communities, raise awareness of the issues they face, and support their integration into society. This was achieved through two strands:

1. Four child refugees from Oxford Spires Academy took part in workshops to co-write orchestral ‘backing tracks’ to underscore performances of their own poetry. These collaborative pieces were performed in concert by professional musicians from the Orchestra of St John’s.
2. Three internationally recognised composers were commissioned to set the young refugees’ words, facilitating cross-cultural collaboration whilst developing professional artistic opportunities.

By empowering the participants to become co-producers of quality cultural works – through the breaking down of cultural barriers between orchestral music-making and their own creative practices ­– they reported feeling empowered to voice their ideas and emotions in public. In addition, their friends and families (non-traditional audiences) gained a considerable insight into orchestral performance, whilst the wider audience reported developing a greater ability to empathise with the refugees’ experiences.

In this Research Works event Dr Toby Young and Dr Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey will share the findings and challenges of the project, and consider how it could be expanded to reach other communities. They will be joined by one of the young refugees to reflect on their experience as a participant, offering a valuable opportunity to engage with a unique young artist and unpack their first experience of orchestral music-making.

Group Vocal Improvisation in Music Therapy: Clinical and Theoretical Considerations

Monday 26 October, 6pm 

Presented in association with the Institute for Social Impact Research in the Performing Arts

Dr Irene Pujol (Guildhall School)

Dr Irene Pujol examines the findings of her doctoral research on the use of group vocal improvisation as a Music Therapy technique in an outpatient adult mental health service.

Findings will be discussed in the context of core debates in the profession, such as the common factors model versus the specific ingredients in different therapeutic approaches, and the music-centred versus the relationship-focused perspectives in music therapy.

East and West in Conversation: Embodying Sound Through the Violin

Monday 2 November, 6pm

Dr Preetha Narayanan (Guildhall School)

This event has been postponed, and will take place in 2021 (date TBC).

Moving to the Beat of its Own Drum: Contemporary Theatre Music in Relation to Gesture and Space

Monday 16 November, 6pm

Prof Dr David Roesner (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

In the past couple of decades, theatre music in German-speaking theatre has seen major developments rendering it a practice far from "incidental" and subservient. In particular, sounds and movements have been mobilised out of the orchestra pit and onto the stage, as well as out of fixed mixes for stereo playback into flexible digital sound arrangements for surround sound setups. This has rendered the relational quality of theatre music quite dynamic: a practice of continuous dialogue between interfaces of speech and sound, noise and music, musical and scenic movement, sense and sensuality.

In this presentation Prof Dr David Roesner will explore one particular aspect in this wide range of performances: the relationship of stillness and movement – both in musical and physical sense – in the interplay of musicians and actors onstage.

Composing Feminisms

Monday 23 November, 6pm

Dr Ella Finer

Sonic culture produces its own kind of politics and history, which like a feedback loop folds into how we attend to feminisms by ear. This talk, in the final weeks of a transformative year, considers how we are guided by those who ‘pick up’ something vital (or apparently so) in the air – those who compose history in conversation-collaboration-communion with the past, for the future.

Register for this online seminar.