To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.
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In Open Ears we investigate and celebrate the massive diversity of music making which exists in our world today by talking with musicians from a wide range of artistic traditions and practices about their musical lives, and how they’ve navigated through their careers.
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In the last blog post we looked at how strict processes can be used in composition, taking examples mostly from minimalist composers. In this post we’ll be looking at a more open-ended type of process: probabilistic decision making. In the process music we looked at last time, each rule had a single possible interpretation, exactly […]
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This is the third in a series of blog posts about the relationship between mathematics and music. In this post, and the next one, we’re going to look in a little more detail at how mathematical processes can be used in composition. This may sound like quite a complex or heavy subject, but in practice […]
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The session will have a practical focus and is primarily aimed at helping students develop their ability to work with the instrument in a composition or orchestration context, however, anyone who wants to learn more about woodwind instruments in any capacity is very welcome to join us.
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Plagiarism is a scary word, with connotations of academic malpractice, cheating in exams, and dodgy essay-writing websites. In practice, however, plagiarism is just as often accidental as deliberate, and can easily stem from some simple misunderstandings about research practice.
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While modernism and contemporary music are often thought of as very mathematical, numbers and ratios are in fact central to all western music. In this post I’m going to take a look at the roots of western music theory and explore the mathematical origins of our notions of consonance and dissonance.
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In this series of blog posts I’m going to be looking at some of the ways composers throughout history have explored music through numbers, and sharing some of my own approaches to composition.
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After writing about one of the most important living composers, Unsuk Chin, for International Women’s Day, I’m continuing with a post about one of the very earliest composers we know of: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), and her utterly unique contribution to the early history of western music.
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Two things prompted me to write this blog post: the news that composer Unsuk Chin has been awarded the Hamburg Bach Prize and the approach of International Women’s Day- Friday 8 March 2019.
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Neglected Visionary, American Provocateur. Written for Black History Month 2018
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