Research Conferences Round Up Spring 2025

For Victoria Hodgkinson:

This international conference brought together artists and academics to explore creative work and theories responding to the conference theme. Speakers spanned disciplines including collage, animation, dance, poetry writing, filmmaking and playwriting, where it was enlightening to see similar theoretical approaches used by artistic practitioners concerned with gender studies across the arts. My paper shared an overview of key methodologies used in my PhD research, which focuses on female performing identity in opera, using Handelian opera as a case study. Central to my paper was a discussion of how performing women can establish and hone creative research ‘tools’ in classical music as a way of constructing more inclusive artistic industry approaches.

Over the span of the conference, central themes arising from delegates concentrated on discussions around reframing and reclaiming female narratives. A particularly thought-provoking paper was given on the first day by Rebecca Louise Carter (Brown University), whose artistic practice with collage and animation intersects with her work as an anthropologist focusing on black studies. She offered insights into black female experience through transforming her anthropological studies into sensitively and thoughtfully crafted animated collages. The visual quality of the work and the theoretical underpinnings of her practice offered a strong impression of how collage, brought to life through animation, can provide new insights into black female networks, communities and identities, constructing new spaces for meaning through reorganisation of information.

Papers in the afternoon sessions responded to areas of thinking related to experiences of female embodiment across various artistic practices. Chiara Harrison Lambe’s PhD work (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is centred around the life and work of Stella Steyn, a 20^th century Irish artist who studied at the Bauhaus and later worked in post-war London. Chiara led us through a detailed visual analysis of Steyn’s self-portraiture and how the artist used physical poses and compositional elements to offer empowered depictions of femininity. This challenged traditional modes in which female bodies are often depicted in art history as subject to ‘male-gaze’.

I discovered fascinating connections between the academic work of Aparna Srivastava, from the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, and my own work, both of us looking back to 18^th century female performers to inform our contemporary artistic practices. Aparna’s research into the 18^th century dancer-poetess Muddupalani has influenced her work as a researcher and classical Bharatanatyam dancer, broadening her own gestures and aesthetic choices.

For me, the second day’s paper sessions began with reading a theatrical scene from Alicia K Garcia’s (Miami Dade College) Dancing into the edge. Her play centres around the 1518 Dancing Plague of Strasbourg and seeks to reframe historical narratives around female hysteria. I read her scene aloud to the room with another conference attendee, and in doing so, I was given the impression that Alicia had engaged in detailed historical and creative research to construct complex female characters, reshaping and broadening our contemporary relationships with these historical women. In the afternoon session, the PhD work of Syazwani Farahin Jefferdin (Nottingham University, Malaysia) showed a similar engagement with reconstructing female narratives in her own analyses and work in fantasy fiction writing.

The final day of the conference was held online and papers focused on topics spanning the feminine psyche in literary contexts to poetic forms and visual formats communicating complex female narratives. The work of PhD student Linghui (Queen’s University) was particularly thought-provoking. Her research into the trauma experienced by the ‘comfort women survivors’ during the Asia Pacific War (1931-1945) showed us how working with graphic novels as an artistic format can start to contend with and bring to the fore complex stories and collective traumas, acting as a both a processing tool and a crucial method of raising awareness and promoting education. This work is very difficult to address in its distressing history and Linghui’s visual practice, along with her background in journalism and communication design, presented insights into how image format and design principles can become necessary tools for promoting greater understanding of female trauma and historical atrocities, building empathy and awareness.

Through attending this conference, I realised that many of us, as female artists and academics from across the globe, were working in similar ways and asking similar questions. Many of our shared approaches were concerned with actively asking ‘how’ women can construct more relevant and inclusive narratives and practices moving forward. This conference not only confirmed my research aims but also offered many valuable artistic research blueprints into how I can sustain and progress my research work and its purposes.

Held annually, EPARM is the primary European platform for sharing Practice Research in music, and this year welcomed 178 attendees including independent researchers, doctoral candidates and professors from institutions across Europe and as far afield as Montréal. My doctoral supervisor and I co-presented a paper entitled ‘Good composers borrow, great ones steal’ on the ethics of working with historical music as a basis for composition, sharing examples of our compositional practice that is informed by this. It was a great pleasure to share ideas with the other attendees both through Q&A sessions, conversation and debate over drinks, and attending other performances and presentations. Highlights included Norwegian folk singer Unni Løvlid and cellist Marianne Baudouin who had developed a fascinating practice performing, teaching and commissioning music faithful to the tonal idiosyncrasies of their native traditions, and an incredibly moving electroacoustic piece by Lithuanian composer Andrius Šiurys for kanklės (zither) and electronics, based on the work of Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak.

On another of the conference themes, co-creation, Oded Ben-Tal and David Dolan presented a real-time collaboration between a pianist and an AI system, and Academy alumna composer Electra Perivolaris gave an insight into some of her work in participatory settings with homeless people and families living with dementia. Jamie Savan and Benjamin Tassie (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) presented some mesmerising electroacoustic compositions performed on 3D-printed replicas of original cornetts, which brought historical performance and electronic music into an interesting new relationship. An inspiring three days were rounded off with a performance by clarinettist Vittoria Ecclesia, who presented at the Doctors in Performance conference held at the Academy in 2023.

The 15^th Annual Academic Conference brought together a diverse range of musicologists, performers and composers to present their work in connection with the theme of music and memory. I had been invited as the Young Composer in Focus, so I delivered a presentation on the ways I see microtonality in my music as creating a mystical space where we can explore the imperfect memories of our own experiences and of historical events. Katarzyna Szymańska-Stułka (Chopin University of Music, Warsaw) and Magdalini Kalopana (National University of Athens) presented research focused on our western cultural memories of the symphony genre in Greek art music, and the concerto genre in Hosokawa’s Violin Concerto. Pianist Anna D’Errico (Venice Conservatory of Music) gave a spellbinding performance of Morton Feldman’s 90-minute Triadic Memories, in which he made a ‘conscious attempt at formalising a disorientation of memory’, something Anna discussed in a pre-concert presentation focusing on patterns, ‘crippled’ symmetries and pedalling, and formal scale.

Alongside this, it was a rare pleasure to gain a deeper insight into Bulgarian art music. Angelina Petrova discussed the concept of autobiographical composition in the works of Konstantin Iliev and Peter Kerkelov, and Kerkelov himself presented an exploration of triadic musical objects in a piece by the recently passed Dragomir Yosifov. Petya Tsvetanova shared research into Bulgarian oratorios written in the 1970s (during communist rule) to commemorate significant figures and events in the nation’s history, and discussed the contemporary musicological perspective on these. The final day concluded with conference Director Iliya Gramatikov giving a few insights into his forthcoming book on musical cryptography in the piano music of Albena Vratchanska, bringing in celebrated examples of cryptograms in the work of composers such as Josquin de Prez, JS Bach and Arnold Schoenberg.