OUR COURSES:
MMus (Experimental Music)
Course Details
The course is aimed at composers, performers and improvisers working in experimental music and wishing to widen their experience. It explores notated music, focusing principally on text, graphic and extended notations, aiming to develop strategies for composing and realising scores. It also engages with instrumentalising objects (both acoustic and electronic) and improvisation. As with all the MMus pathways, there are modules which involve producing a collaborative project, developing research skills and academic writing, and a final project.
The course is a practical one, with sessions involving realising scores, improvisation and discussion, supported by tutorials. As a composer, you will create a portfolio of work and be involved in its performance, as well as contributing to projects by fellow musicians. As an improviser, you will present a series of live events, developing your personal language and instrumental setup and contributing to group projects. As a performer, you will make realisations of existing work and that by fellow musicians on the course. Everyone will be involved with practical activities, and take part in extra-curricular performances with our two experimental music groups: Material (mostly notated, instrumental/vocal music) and/or Behaviour (mostly improvised, electronic music).
The pathway is led by Dr James Saunders and Dr Andy Keep. James is a composer, and performs in the duo Parkinson Saunders and with Apartment House. He is the editor of the recent Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (which included a chapter by Andy), and has published writing on Christian Wolff, modularity, and the use of dictaphones in experimental music. He is currently working on a book about text notation (Continuum, 2011) with John Lely, supported by an AHRC Research Award, and is editing a forthcoming edition of Contemporary Music Review on the Wandelweiser group.
Andy is performer whose musical activities have evolved through an immense amount of diversity. His professional practice, teaching, and research have slowly gravitated away from studio production and the role of instrumentalist into live electronics performance, composition, and the teaching of fluid and innovative approaches to technology in the sonic arts. Recent writings include ‘Instrumentalizing: Approaches to improvising with sounding objects in experimental music’‚ in James Saunders (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, and ‘Audio Y connectors: My secret for instant guerrilla oscillators‚ raw synthesis and dirty cross modulations’, My Favorite Things - The Joy of the Gizmo: Leonardo Music Journal 17:30-1 2007.
Recent visitors to the department include Tom Johnson, Gavin Bryars, Evan Parker, Kaffe Matthews, Robin Rimbaud, John Lely, Tim Parkinson and Lawrence Crane.
For further information about the pathway, please email James using the form below:
