I’m so exited to announce that Dr Rachel Drury (RCS), Dr Bede Williams (St Andrews), Dr Mhairi Stewart (St Andrews), and Rebecca Duncan (Dundee Science Centre) and I have received SGSAH CDA funding to co-supervise a PhD student to design music and/or sound installations for Dundee Science Centre. There is more info here and here. (The application deadline is June 7, 2021. Feel free to send me a note if you have any questions about it!)
Thank you so much to Kirsty MacLeod for inviting me to be a guest on the W.E.E. podcast, for a great discussion about interdisciplinary science-art research and creation with Beth Reinke and Amy Cheu. You can hear this episode (as well as lots of other interesting discussions) here.
I’m pleased to share my most recent zoomusicology article, “‘Hearken to the Hermit Thrush: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Listening,” which was published as part of the special research topic “Songs and Signs: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cultural Transmission and Inheritance in Human and Nonhuman Animals” in Frontiers in Psychology. In this article I discuss my own approach to zoomusicological inquiry, and use the example of how the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) has been understood and discussed over the past 200 years to illustrate why interdisciplinary perspectives are essential for better understanding of animal songs. The full text is available for free here.
Last year I was commissioned to write a piece for the Kapten Trio by Chamber Music Scotland. It was a fantastic experience from start to finish, with lots of discussions and rehearsals with the Kapten Trio throughout the creative process, and two amazing Creative Scotland residencies at Hospitalfield in Arbroath. My piece, called Bowheads, is based on songs of the Bowhead Whale. (Thanks to biologists Catherine Berchok and Stephanie Grassia for sharing recordings with me!) The Kapten Trio took Boweads (along with pieces by Shiori Usui, Mozart, Debussy, and Brahms) on a 6-concert tour of Scotland. This video (made by Anne Milne) is from the premiere, at the Barn in Banchory, as part of the Sound Festival.
I’ve long had a hunch that even small differentials in the likelihood of having pieces performed between women and men composers can have a huge cumulative effect over the long-term. My partner Neil Banas is a computer modeller, and he made me an interactive model for this article (published on New Music Box), which indeed bears out my theory. Drag the blue sliders to see how gender (or other) inequality may affect composers over the course of their careers.
I’m listening to a lot of bobolink song, as research for the new piece I’m writing for the Vancouver Symphony (to be premiered at the Vancouver Symphony New Music Festival in January 2019). Bobolink song sounds incredible when you hear it live (or on a full speed recording) — shiny, bubbly, almost metallic. But to me, it’s even more incredible when you slow it down so you can really hear the intricate interactions between the notes. Here is one example that you really should listen to right now! I’ve taken a fragment of a song and presented it at 1/8 speed, 1/4 speed, 1/2 speed, full speed, and finally the entire song at full speed. (The recording of this song was made by Andrew Spencer, and can be found on the Xeno-Canto website.)
In January I was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on Diversity within progressive musicology at the Critical Theory for Musicology conference at University of London. I’m not a musicologist by training, and really enjoyed spending the weekend listening to and talking with all the musicologists striving to build bridges between the worlds of “new musicology” and “traditional musicology.” Here is my contribution, written up in blog form on the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Exchange Thoughts Blog.
I’m thrilled to announce that St Andrews biologists Luke Rendell, Ellen Garland, and I have received a St Leonard’s Interdisciplinary Scholarship to fund a PhD student. The ideal student will have a strong background in both biology and music, and will become involved with activities at both St Andrews and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. More information can be found here. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
The Fair Trade String Trio (Ashley Windle, Hannah Levinson, and Jeanette Stenson) will be premiering my newest piece, Field Guide, on July 20 through 26 on their second Pacific Northwest tour, with concerts in Vancouver BC, Victoria BC, Bellingham WA, and Portland OR. More details of the concerts can be found on their website. Field Guide is based on the songs of three birds which can be found in the Western US, the horned lark, the greater sage grouse, and the Western meadowlark. Though these birds aren’t currently endangered, they depend on the wild land of the US National Parks and Forests — and are one of the many, many reasons why we all need to be working to preserve these lands.
The Sunday Mail/Daily Record did a story about my research on seal vocalizations! Thank you Sunday Mail and Heather Greenaway for the lovely coverage of my work!
My piece Seal Songs, based on the Selkie legend, was originally written for the Voice Factory Youth Choir and the Paragon Ensemble, conducted by Mark Evans, and premiered in Glasgow and Skye in 2011. Seal Songs received its US premiere by the San Francisco Girls Chorus and Trinity Youth Chorus in June, 2017. I’m currently conducting research on seal vocalizations with Prof Vincent Janik and Alex Carroll at St Andrews University, and will be writing a new piece based on my research, to be performed by the St Andrews New Music Ensemble, conducted by Bede Williams, in February 2018.
