News
New Collaborative Research Centre Launched
A new large-scale collaborative research centre, in which the Oxford Music Faculty is a partner, was launched last Friday. The AHRC-funded Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP), a collaboration between the music faculties/departments of Oxford, Cambridge, King's College London, and Royal Holloway London was launched on 2 October at an event in Cambridge, which is the Centre's host institution.
The Centre's five-year research programme with funding of £2.1m, follows on from the successes of its predecessor Centre, the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and will focus on live musical performance and creative music-making. The Centre will undertake five research projects with associated workshops, establish a Performance Studies Network to enable collaborative research between scholars and performers from around the world, and award Visiting Fellowships attached to each of the four partner institutions as well as three doctoral studentships.
Oxford's project, entitled 'Creative Practice in Contemporary Concert Music', will be directed by Eric Clarke, and will investigate the ways in which creative practices are distributed between composers and first performers of their work, and how a broad conception of improvisation might be used to understand that distributed creativity. The project will involve the use of a variety of broadly empirical and ethnographic methods, and the commissioning of a number of new works and first performances, to research this fascinating area. For further information go to the Centre's website.