Creative Practices
Using composition and performance to explore identity, place, and culture across diverse musical traditions.
Composing and performing are both ways of learning through practice and of exploring new knowledge about music and musical activity.
Both can also articulate and convey identity, authenticity, activism, and pleasure. They can provoke philosophical and theoretical unpacking, and articulate political and cultural positions.
However, as well as this, creative practices can be research activities in their own right.
We can ask questions of them, but also allow them to raise questions themselves.
The range of musics our group performs reflect our varied approach to practice-based music research.
Folk and traditional music from England, the Shetland Islands, North America and Scandinavia are brought into dialogue with contemporary song and activism.
Audiovisual media and archival research into forgotten local repertoires are brought back to life through reconstruction, creative adaptation, and performance.
The range of our improvisation also takes many different forms. This ranges from historically-informed organ improvisation, turntablism, free improvisation. Much of this is often using DIY technologies and in non-concert performance spaces.
Site-specificity is also important across the board. Practitioners are aware of the multi-faceted context of their practice.
Sound and music of the natural environment are important research strands and involve:
- field recording
- electroacoustic composition
- site-specific improvisation
- the urban architectural spaces of the Tudor period experienced through virtual reality technologies
- historical sites
- reclaimed spaces of contemporary DIY culture
Historically-informed performance practice around the human voice is also explored. We do this through Baroque and contemporary opera, Tudor and contemporary church music, and vocal music of the later Renaissance.
Music staff also collaborate with writers, visual artists, film makers, and theatre. They do this internally and externally, with many involved in cross-disciplinary doctoral supervisions.
Nancy Kerr Elliott
Lecturer in Folk and Traditional Music
I'm a folk educator with over 25 years’ teaching experience in both formal and informal education settings. I've led workshops and choirs and taught 1:1 at festivals, residential courses, schools and universities in the UK, Australia, Canada, Europe and Asia.
My music psychotherapy background informs my practice as a facilitator of client-led music-making throughout the lifespan.
Subject areas include:
- Creative Practice Research
- Traditions of these Islands
- Folk Ensemble
- Applied Songwriting & Composition (Folk & Modal)
- Folk Music, Gender & Identity
Larry Zazzo
Senior Lecturer in Music
I joined Newcastle University in 2017 and continue to perform in concert halls and opera houses throughout the world. I have made over 25 recordings of rarely-performed Baroque vocal masterpieces as well as premiering new works by Thomas Adès, Jonathan Dove, Missy Mazzoli, Iain Bell, Rolf Riehm, and Geoff Page.
In addition to my ongoing research into Baroque opera and oratorio, performer wellbeing, historical performance practice, and opera libretto authorship recognition, my recent world-premiere recordings include Jonathan Dove's dramatic cantata for countertenor, Hojoki, with the BBC Philharmonic (Orchid Classics), and Baroque Gender Stories, a collaboration with mezzo soprano Vivica Genaux and Lautten Compagney Berlin exploring disguise and gender ambiguity in late Baroque opera (Sony Classics).
I frequently presents workshops and masterclasses around the world (working recently with young singers at the Barock Vokal Akademie Mainz, the Utrecht Conservatoire and Capetown University's opera studio), and have been a jury member for the Cesti Voice Competition in Innsbruck as well as a jury chair for the London Handel Singing Competition. I regularly give interviews in both UK and European media, such as Radio 3's The Listening Service and In Tune as well as Dutch and Croatian classical radio programmes focusing on his creative practice and musicological research.
At Newcastle, in addition to my roles as Head of Performance and Senior Tutor, I regularly lead a group of Music students in a year-long module, Performing Early Opera, conducting and directing fully-staged, historically-informed performances of Baroque dramatic works, including Handel's Acis and Galatea and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Fairy Queen at the Tyne Theatre and Opera House and at Seaton Delaval Hall.
Catriona Macdonald
Senior Lecturer
Catriona Macdonald is a proud bearer of one of the world's great fiddle traditions, that of the Shetland Isles. A pupil of the late Dr Tom Anderson MBE, Catriona at once embodies the strength and spirit of her heritage with the freshness and diversity of a thoroughly modern performer. Her superb playing and great charisma have established her a worldwide reputation.
Matthew Ord
Lecturer
My research applies a cultural-historical approach to the intersection of ideology and musical practice in British folk and popular music. In 2017 I completed my AHRC-funded PhD thesis which combined ethnographic and desk-based research to explore the cultural significance of sound recording in the British post-war folk revival.
I am interested in the role of recording and other media technologies in folk music cultures, and have published chapters on the role of recording within the British folk-rock movement, and on the media activism of the songwriter Ewan MacColl.
In December 2017 I was appointed postdoctoral fellow on an AHRC Creative Engagement project on the development of music tourism in Scotland. I am currently preparing articles on contemporary English folk field recordings, and on theories of cultural transmission in folk music historiography. In addition to my research activities, I remain an active musician with significant professional experience as a singer and guitarist in a range of folk and popular styles.
Magnus Williamson
Professor of Early Music
Since the 1990s I have focused on musical sources and contexts of the late Middle Ages, mainly in Britain, but more recently in France as well. I have several on-going research projects on the soundscape of the pre-Reformation parish, the printing of music books (particularly the often neglected but very significant corpus of printed chant books), and the Chapel Royal under the Tudors.
I have been Principal Investigator on various RCUK-funded projects, including Tudor Partbooks: The manuscript legacies of John Sadler, John Baldwin and their antecedents (Co-I: Dr Julia Craig-McFeely of Oxford University and DIAMM) (AHRC, 2014-17). I was for some years General Editor of the British Academy series, Early English Church Music (2008-2021) and am now its Chairman.
Mariam Rezaei
Senior Lecturer in Music Technology and Composition
My professional expertise and innovation informs my university teaching. The most clear example of this has been my delivery of an innovative DJ Skills and Turntablism undergraduate course, MUS2016. Unique in its perspective, the hybrid course brings together performance skills in vinyl and digital DJing skills with creative composition.
Most DJ courses offered are limited to teaching only DJing beatmatching with digital kit or CDJs. Reflective of my personal research achievements, this unique course is world-leading in innovative turntable composition pedagogy. This teaching has also informed my teaching on Composing with Technologies MUS2048, where turntable composition was included with the module when MUS2016 was not able to be delivered in 2021-22 academic year.
My teaching is informed by my professional practice in free music and experimental new music aesthetics. Co-leading MUS2071 Jazz Today: Tomorrow Is The Question, and MUS2048 Free Music Practice includes my research, interviews and writing for Wire Magazine, my upcoming book and professional experiences inform the innovative pedagogy of these two new music courses.
William Edmondes
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Performance
William Thomas Gustav Edmondes is the full 'real' name of the artist and performer variously known as Gwilly Edmondez, Gustav Thomas, Copydex, Virginia Pipe and more. As a composer-performer my primary materials are voice, recorded media, sampling & sequencing; I also work with 8-bit Techno (Gameboy with Nanoloop),online video and drawing; my primary aesthetic is Wild Pop.
I'm one half of the duo YEAH YOU with Elvin Brandhi; and publish (and posts on his Claws & Tongues page) extra-academic critical musicology and other writings as Gustav Thomas, my middle names and the first names of my grandfathers, which also indicates his background as half-Welsh, half-Slovene.
I teach Contemporary Music Practice at all three stages alongside historical-cultural musicology options on Hip Hop, Jazz, Fringe Cultures and Underground/Experimental Popular Music.
Bennett Hogg
Senior Lecturer
Current Work
- composing music for release with Arts Council of England funded book with Mike Collier, Geoff Sample, and Alex Charrington - also writing a chapter for this book.
- commission for new work for Icelandic early music group Nordic Affect.
- commission for ten-string guitar piece for CD release in 2019 by Stefan Ostersjo.
- co-investigator on "Bee-ing Human", Leverhulme Trust three-year funded interdisciplinary research project on Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie, a 17th-century book on bees and beekeeping, and co-investigator (Newcastle University lead) on Sonic Intangibles, a twi-year joint UKRI-funded interdisciplinary project exploring data sonification.
- Co-editor of special issue of Seismograf, a Danish music and sound art journal specialising in the innovatory "audio paper" format.
- Director of Landscape Quartet - formerly an AHRC-funded environmental sound art project.
- Curator and producer of sound art and music for Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Gardens, Stamfordham, Northumberland.
- co-editing with Matthew Sansom a new edited issue of Contemporary Music Review - "Music, Sound, and Landscape" - now in press
Phil Begg
Lecturer in Composition
My research explores the aesthetic and affective mechanics of sound recording/music production and the artistic agency of the producer (and, particularly, the composer-producer) through multi-disciplinary, contextually-situated professional practice.
I am particularly interested in the academic study of record production and cinema sound design.
I remain active as a practicing composer, producer and sound designer. In addition to my solo work with electric guitar and modular synthesizer, I lead the experimental big-band project Midnight Doctors, which has been featured several times on BBC Radio 6 Music. I have worked on internationally recognised collaborative film and video art projects as sound designer and composer, and have significant professional experience as a producer for artists including Richard Dawson, Rhodri Davies, John Butcher and Cath & Phil Tyler.
Rob Mackay
Senior Lecturer in Composition
My main area of research is in electroacoustic composition and sound art. Recent projects have moved towards a more cross-disciplinary approach, including theatre, text in performance, audiovisual installation work, acoustic ecology, and human-computer interaction.
My work has gained international recognition in the form of prizes and honours, and my pieces are performed regularly worldwide (including several performances on BBC Radio 3).