Graduate Research Colloquium: Eric Clarke & Jennifer Walshe in conversation

The Faculty’s most recent appointee, composer Jennifer Walshe, and its next retiree, Eric Clarke, will be in discussion with one another and with you the audience on the general theme of ‘Entanglement’. We will take this as an opportunity to consider a wide and flexible range of topics relating to our general theme, including but not limited to: creativity and collaboration in composition/performance/improvisation; the entanglements of noise/sound/music; the distributed or entangled character of knowledge; entanglements with institutions and histories; entanglements with people and/or cultures. Some of Jennifer’s recent work has dealt with the entanglement between human and non-human beings, whether they be biological or artificial, and ranging from dogs to robots and AI; and some of Eric’s recent work has engaged with distributed creativity and the mycelial character of musical ecosystems.

Free to attend, register here.

Professor Eric Clarke went to the University of Sussex to read for a degree in neurobiology and graduated with a degree in music. After an MA in music, he was awarded a PhD in psychology from the University of Exeter, and became lecturer in music at City University in London in 1981. He was appointed as James Rossiter Hoyle Professor of Music at Sheffield in 1993, and took up the post of Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford in October 2007. Professor Clarke is an Associate Editor of the journals Music Perception and Musicae Scientiae, is on the editorial boards of Empirical Musicology Review, Radical Musicology, and Per Musi; and is a consulting editor for Psychology of Music. He was an Associate Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council´s Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) from 2004-2007, and of the AHRC Phase II Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP, 2009-2014)), was elected to membership of the Academia Europaea in 2009, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2010.

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, was released on Tetbind in 2020. The album uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart. Her work was recently profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

About the series:
The Colloquia feature leading figures, as well as younger scholars, from across the world. They present their research in papers on all kinds of music-related topics. Graduate students Marinu Leccia and Judith Valerie Engel organise the series. Presentations are followed by a discussion and virtual drinks reception. Free and open to all Music Faculty students and members. If you would like more information, please email marinu.leccia@linacre.ox.ac.uk or judith-valerie.engel@chch.ox.ac.uk.