Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

Birmingham Conservatoire Public Research Seminar Series with Professor Michael Russ   You are warmly invited to Birmingham Conservatoire’s Spring 2016 Series of Public Research Seminars, on a wide variety of musical topics, which take place on selected Tuesday afternoons, 3.30-5.00 pm. Presenters include Conservatoire staff, doctoral students and external speakers. These seminars are open to all, […]

CHIME: Exploring the Relationship between Jazz Festivals and European Heritage Sites | Professor Tony Whyton (Birmingham Conservatoire/School of Media) In this presentation, Professor Tony Whyton explores the themes and interim findings of the JPI-Heritage Plus project Cultural Heritage and Improvised Music in European Festivals (CHIME).  CHIME explores the uses and re-uses of different types of heritage through […]

Eighteenth-century Lyrics in Nineteenth-century Dress: Brahms’s Settings of Ludwig Hölty’s Poetry (Lecture-recital) | Dr Natasha Loges (Royal College of Music) and Stephan Loges (bass-baritone) Brahms’s poetic interests ranged far beyond the tastes of most of his contemporaries. One striking inclusion in his panoply of song-poets is the eighteenth-century lyric poet Ludwig Hölty, who specialised in beautifully […]

New Light on Chopin’s Études | Roy Howat (Royal Academy of Music and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) Roy Howat (Keyboard Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music and Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland; also Research Associate at Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University) is editing Chopin’s 27 Études as part of the Peters […]

Revoicing a ‘Choice Eunuch’: The Cornetto and Historical Models of Vocality | Dr Jamie Savan (Birmingham Conservatoire) ‘Imitate the human voice’ is a familiar exhortation to instrumentalists in the pedagogical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But what does it mean to imitate the voice in practical terms? To what extent does the ‘vocality’ of […]

Diseased, or Just Vulgar – What is it about Vibrato? | Dr George Kennaway (University of Huddersfield) Of all the topics that recur in discussions of historical performance, vibrato remains the most controversial. Whether missing when presumed needed, or present when held to be historically uninformed, it provokes reactions that would never be aroused by, say, […]