News
Oxford Easter Conferences
The Oxford Music Faculty and a number of Oxford's colleges played host to two major international conferences and an international symposium over the Easter Vacation.
The Oxford-Princeton Research Partnership in Music Analysis was initiated with the support of the John Fell Fund in 2008. The first of two Oxford-Princeton Analysis Symposia took place in the Faculty of Music, 14-16 April. Professors Kofi Agawu and Scott Burnham, along with two of their Princeton graduate students, Johanna Frymoyer and Christopher Matthay, spent three days in Oxford with five Oxford postholders and two graduate students (all participants pictured right). The theme of the Symposium was 'Analytical Encounters', which was explored via wide-ranging discussion of issues in response to repertoire from Machaut to Goldfrapp. A plenary session examined 'practices and prospects' for theory and anaysis on both sides of the Atlantic. The second Symposium will take place next year in Princeton.
The previous week the Faculty of Music and St John's College played host to the annual meeting of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology; the conference theme was 'Musical Knowledge'. This was the largest meeting of the BFE to date, including 111 presentations, a keynote panel and address, performances by Oxford Maqam, Oxford Gamelan and Projecto Almagreira, and a reception in the Bate Collection. The BFE is no longer a national conference in any simple sense. Paper givers this year came from Canada and the USA, Australia, South Africa and Hong Kong; the largest proportion of conference delegates came from continental Europe. A programme and abstracts may still be found at the conference website.
Oxford was well represented, with papers given by Tom Hodgson, Nomi Dave, Ioannis Polychronakis, Noel Lobley, Chih-Suei Shaw, Anna Stirr and Nahid Siamdost. The keynote panel (pictured left), chaired by Pavlos Kavouras of the University of Athens, involved presentations from Georgina Born, Marcello Sorce Keller, Suzel Reily and Martin Clayton, each engaging with the key epistemological questions raised by the conference theme from distinct theoretical perspectives.
The keynote speech was given by Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico. He described his talk, 'Acoustemologies', as a discussion of 'acoustic epistemology, or sound as a way of knowing space-time interplays, and illustrate with some materials from sound-cosmology-ecology triangulations evident in human musical interactions with Papua New Guinea rainforest birds, European pastoral bells, and West African urban car horns.'
Earlier in the vacation (26-28 March) Merton College, supported by the Faculty of Music and the RMA, hosted the conference on Music and Representation. Distinguished speakers from institutions across four continents were heard discussing the central theme from a very broad range of perspectives. The keynote address was delivered by Professor Richard Taruskin of the University of California at Berkeley.