Lectures and workshops

The most exciting thing about music at university level is the opportunity to apply your intelligence to practising and performing music.  Whatever your academic subject, your time at university will show significant development in your powers of reasoning, analysis and practical argument.  Bringing these skills to bear on your musical endeavours can yield startling results, and are sometimes more effective than practising three hours a day on a specialist music programme...

Most of us have been taught music by hours or repetition in a graded progression from easy to hard, learning techniques by a process of copying a teacher or other players.  Thinking about how or why we practise or play something in a certain way hasn't usually been top of the agenda.  Knowing just a bit more about what goes on in the mind when we listen to music can have a huge impact on practice strategies, performance tactics, and also performance nerves.

The Music Office Lecture series aims to condense the things everyone really needs to know about music into a series of lectures with accompanying workshops.  These were originally intended for Music Scholars, but have been opened up to everyone, so please feel free to come along. The 2012/13 programme will be updated throughout the year, but the kinds of topics you can expect include:

  • The Harmonic series;
  • Psychoacousitcs;
  • Rhythm;
  • Sound Engineering;
  • Song Writing;
  • Baroque and Classical phrasing;
  • Jazz;
  • Opera;
  • Music Theatre;
  • Vocal styles;
  • Sightreading for Singers;
  • Conducting workshops

For information about when these workshops will take place, please contact the Music Office by email at music@ex.ac.uk or by phone 01392 723814

Autumn Term Dates

Voice Workshop - "The Singing Voice; science meets art".

Date: Saturday 13th October 2012

Time: 11:00 to 13:00 & 14:00 to 17:00

Venue: Kay House Duryard

All Voice Scholars or those interested in Singing of any genre are invited to attend this voice workshop.

This is very strongly recommended for anyone with an interest in voice, or who has applied for singing Lessons as part of the Scholarship programme.

Research is giving us a picture of what actually happens when we sing. The process of integrating this knowlege with various methods of teaching singing is mostly a problem of terminology. Support, diaphragm, breath control, soft palette, lowered larynx... These are all 'technical' terms that turn out not to have quite the expected basis in physiology.

This workshop is critical to getting the most out of any singing lessons you have in the future, and will give you both common terms to discuss with one another and very clear methods to construct your own sound in the meantime. Based on research by Jo Estill, Johann Sundberg, and others, and practical experience of work with Mary King and Paul Farrington.

Scholarship Lectures 

Here is the full list of dates and topic of this term's Scholars' Lectures:

Time: From 18:30

Venue: Alumni Auditorium ion the Forum

Lecture No. 2 - Friday 12th October: Music and Identity

Constructing ourselves as effective learners, and some of the neuroscience of skills acquisition.

Lecture No. 3 - Friday 19th October: Performance nerves

Good and bad, over  and under-rehearsing, and what to do about it!

Lecture No. 4 - Friday 26th October: Sound and our ears

Taste and judgement about sound, what that has to do with space, acoustics and recordings, (hopefully in the forum), assisted reverb in the Auditorium, and incidentally, how not to despair if your research yields no results! 

Lecure N. 5 - Friday 2nd November: Rhythm

If you have previously attended Music Week (this does not include orchestra week) or the rhythm workshop in a previous year, then you are welcome but this evening is not compulsory. For everyone else, (and especially pianists) this is the most useful thing you can do to improve sight-reading/phrasing/ability to play and sing in effective ensemble with others.

This is a practical introduction to the concepts which will be covered more theoretically next week, in a discussion of sight-reading and memorising – two sides of the same coin.