Music Research Seminar Series: Lauren Redhead

For the first in our 2021-2022 Music Research Seminar Series, City welcomes Dr Lauren Redhead.

This seminar is open to the public and free to attend.

Space is limited is 30 event sign-ups, to comply with our COVID safety policies, so please register via the button above.

Dr Lauren Redhead: Recreating and Reimagining Music: Performance and Improvisation as Iterative Processes.

This presentation will discuss how the iterative approach through which I have previously conceived my practice in composition and the creation of music can be applied to an understanding of performance and improvisation practices.

At the forefront of this consideration is the idea that–despite various attempts to de-hierarchise musical practices–the material cultures of music still provide reference points that maintain the work concept, even when the music itself might be rooted in practices that are beyond the score.

Although I am not able to present a definitive answer to this problem, I will explore what performance and improvisation might do to or with a piece after the creation of material objects that might be taken as a complete statement of the music such as scores or studio recordings.

In particular, I address the project hearmleoþ-gieddunga that began as a series of graphic scores and was released as an album in October 2018.

By exploring the roles played by performance and improvisation after the album was made, I explore what might meaningfully be meant by the term process in this context and how such an understanding might also intersect with the various possible understandings of improvisation.

About the Speaker:

Dr Lauren Redhead is a composer of experimental music whose work is published by Material Press (Berlin), a performer of music for organ and electronics that has been released on the sfz music and pan y rosas discos labels, and a musicologist who writes about the aesthetics and socio-semiotics of 20th and 21st Century musics.

She is Senior Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Music at Goldsmiths, University of London.