Student Biographies

Clare’s research aims to understand the prevailing performance styles practiced by home-grown and international flute virtuosi active in England c.1750-1830, tracing the subsequent transformation of these into clearly distinguished national styles of playing.
 
During this period the flute emerged as an instrument at the height of fashion, attracting distinguished virtuosi to the English concert platform. This was symbolic of the overall shifting of music’s position within society, where a burgeoning enthusiasm for public concerts and solo concert tours brought high quality music to a wider audience. England witnessed the growth of a concert-going public which sought the excitement of the celebrity virtuoso concert and the evolution of the critical review expressed in a plethora of new music journals and magazines. At the same time, the modish instrument inspired a surging number of amateur players for whom instruction manuals and easily accessible music abounded.
 
From within this rich social, cultural and economic climate, England pioneered the development of the flute's keyed system in order to meet the needs of its performers who sought an ever-increasing virtuosity. Innovations in flute design facilitated the playing of difficult keys, improved tuning and intonation over an increased range, and resulted in an instrument capable of producing a larger, more flexible and homogenous timbre. A largely overlooked period in the flute’s history, this was a time of intense innovation in flute playing and manufacture which transformed the instrument’s potential and was the very inspiration for Boehm’s revolutionary system.
 
Clare Beesley graduated from the Royal Conservatory of the Hague (The Netherlands) with a Masters Degree in early music and historical performance practice, receiving a distinction for her achievements in renaissance consort playing. From 2000 - 2006 she studied baroque and classical traverso with Wilbert Hazelzet and renaissance flute with Kate Clark. Prior to this, Clare received both BA (hons) and MA degrees in music as a modern flautist at the Birmingham Conservatoire (UK).
Clare performs regularly throughout Europe with various period instrument ensembles which together cover a repertoire spanning the 16th to the mid 19th centuries. In addition, Clare works on a freelance basis with the period instrument orchestras Concerto d'Amsterdam, The Northern Consort and Orchester Le Chardon. Clare has given workshops and lectures on historical performance practice in the US, Netherlands and UK. She is editorial assistant for Eighteenth Century Music.

www.clarebeesley.info
 

Amy’s research interests centre on topics in which the theory and practice of music merge or interact, attempting to bridge the gap between musicology and performance, and focussing instead on music in all its forms and expressions. This entails a focus on performance practice, recordings, and cultural contexts of music-making in the 20th and 21st centuries.

She completed both her BMus and MMus degrees at King’s College London, where she is now writing up her thesis under the supervision of Professor Daniel Leech-Wilkinson. Her research is focused on the conductor Charles Mackerras: she is investigating his recordings and live performances, exploring the issues that arise when comparing these two very different performance situations. In addition to detailed analysis of the performances, there is a strong contextual aspect to this research which involves interviewing Sir Charles himself, the musicians, producers, and engineers he works with, and fieldwork observation of the rehearsal, concert, and recording processes.

Amy’s interests in both the theory and practice of music extend beyond her research, which she balances with her career both as a violin teacher and a performer. In addition to this, she has worked as research assistant to Timothy Day at the British Library Sound Archive, done work for Cambridge University Press, undertaken research for Nicholas Kenyon during his time as director of the BBC Proms, coordinated the 2007 conference The Proms and British Musical Life (held at the British Library in partnership with the BBC and King’s College London), organised the Royal Musical Association Research Students’ Conference (January 2009), is editorial manager for the journal Music & Letters, and is author and co-ordinator of the undergraduate module ‘Music in Performance’ at King’s College London (2009 and 2010).

Email: ameliebc@yahoo.com  

Edward Breen was a choral scholar at King's College, London and holds a Master's degree in Historical Musicology (Goldsmiths College) and a Postgraduate Vocal Diploma (Trinity College of Music). He is currently writing his PhD under the supervision of Professor Daniel Leech-Wilkinson on 'The performance practice of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London'.
As part of his research, Edward is undertaking a series of interviews with musicians from The Early Music Consort of London and Musica Reservata, details of which are available from www.falsettist.com. His paper ‘David Munrow: Thoughts on vibrato and a glimpse into his record collection’ was presented at the National Early Music Association International Conference (2009) and will be published in the conference proceedings next year.
For the last ten years Edward worked as a singer and specialized in choral music and oratorio. He has performed with ensembles such as Chapelle du Roi, Kammerkórinn Carmina (Reykjavik), Euterpe Baroque Consort (Antwerp) and Concertante of London; and with many of London’s professional church choirs including St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. He now teaches at Morley College.
 

Marc is in the second year of a PhD under the supervision of John Deathridge, looking at the operas Wozzeck and Arabella from a critical perspective. He is interested in trying to determine how the ethical and political conflicts that constitute the crisis of modernity become frozen into aesthetic conflicts within the boundaries of the artwork. His critical method locates the operatic artwork not in the score, nor in the libretto, but as a performance in the theatre, an approach which allows him to challenge more traditional interpretations. He is keen to view the operas within their wider political, philosophical and artistic context, drawing on a variety of sources from outside the usual musicological discourse.
 
Marc began his academic studies in mathematics, graduating from the University of Sheffield with the prize in pure mathematics. Realizing that his heart really lay in music, he then read for a second undergraduate degree at the University of Huddersfield, where he won the musicology prize with a dissertation on Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. After a break from academia to ‘see the world’, teaching English in Tokyo and Hong Kong, Marc then completed a master’s at King’s, gaining a distinction with a dissertation on Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre.
 
Marc is currently working as a teaching assistant in the department. He also tries to keep up his piano playing with teaching and the occasional performance.
 
Email: skoorbcram@hotmail.com
 

Carlo is in the second year of his PhD, writing on the cinematic appropriation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. His research interests revolve around the range of ways in which music is re-thought and reused, whether it be through compositional revision, editorial intervention, academic criticism, recomposition or multimedia interaction, and on the ways in which these manoeuvres problematise our notions of aesthetic identity and historical change. His Masters dissertation is published on the online journal Radical Musicology: http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2006.htm
 
Carlo previously studied at the Conservatorio Alfredo Casella, L'Aquila, Italy (Composition), at the University of Southampton (BA) and King's College, London (MMus).
 

Abigail Dolan’s PhD thesis explores musical performance through an examination of historical flute recordings. The research looks into the changes of flute performance style between 1900-1950, focusing on tone evolution and gesture as means of expression. The research is supervised by Prof. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and was awarded the AVI fellowship and the 2006 Edison Fellowship of the British Library Sound Archive.
 
Before taking the MPhil/PhD course at King's College London, Abigail completed with distinction an Individual Interdisciplinary M.A. programme at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, focusing on the fin de siècle interrelationships between music and other arts. Her thesis, Painting and Expression in Sound: Expressionistic Symbolism in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, examines the ways in which Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunnaire acts as a meeting point between French Symbolism and German Expressionism, and also explores the ways in which visual, symbolic and psychological elements in the text turn into auditory metaphors.
 
Abigail is a concert flautist, performing as a soloist and in chamber music concerts worldwide. She has recorded for the French label Selena as well as for several radio stations and TV channels. Alongside her concert activities, she has been teaching at the American Conservatory in Paris and at the Achron Conservatory, a leading conservatory in Israel. For the last four years, Abigail has been teaching at the Music Department of Cambridge University as part of the Instrumental Award Scheme. Since 2006 Abigail is an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge University.
 
http://www.abigaildolan.com/
abigail.dolan1@mac.com

Christopher's doctoral thesis on The Pierrot Ensembles traces the British-led repertory of works derived from Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire and analyses salient works by Lutyens, Britten, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle and others. He received the Society for Music Analysis (SMA) 2001/02 Award for Postgraduate Study and Musica Britannica 2004 and 2005 Louise Dyer Awards for Doctoral Study.
 
Christopher is a Visiting Lecturer in Music and Programme Leader of BA Music & Arts Management at Middlesex University. He also lectures at Birkbeck College, University of London. Previously he taught music analysis at King's College, London, worked at the University of Leicester, and was a Repertoire Researcher for the Performing Right Society (PRS).
 
Tel. +44 (0)7952 679 350
Email. mailto:c.dromey@mdx.ac.uk
Web. http://www.mdxmusic.net/staff.htm
 
Publications & Papers:
 
'Unbreaking the mould: Zemlinsky's Maiblumen blühten überall and the string sextet genre', in Zemlinsky Lost & Found, ed. Michael Frith (London: Middlesex UP, forthcoming).
 
'Peter Maxwell Davies', in New Makers of Modern Culture, ed. Justin Wintle
(New York: Routledge, 2006).
 
'Elisabeth Lutyens 100: (in)decent second-generation serialism in post-war
Britain', In Medias Res: Music Research Journal, Vol. 3 (November 2006).
 
'The 'Pierrot' Ensemble before the Pierrot Players', paper given at
conference on "Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and its legacy", organised by
Jane Manning, Kingston University, 2 March 2006.
 
'The 'Pierrot' Ensemble in London: The Birth of a Genre?', paper given at
Society for Music Analysis TAGS Day for Music Postgraduates, University of
East Anglia, 23 April 2005.

Noam received his MA in music composition from New York University and a BM from the University of Tulsa with a minor in Philosophy and a TURC research fellowship in music. Noam is a member of the Circles and Lines composer’s collective in New York City and is the composer-in-residence at the Midtown School for the Performing Arts in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is pursuing his PhD in composition at King's College studing with Silvina Milstein on a Jack Kent Cook Graduate Fellowship.
Noam started writing music and playing guitar, bass and drums in punk and metal bands at the age of 12, eventually broadening his interests to classical and jazz. He combines these musical idioms with music heard growing up as an Israeli born to Argentinean and Brazilian parents. Noam is an eclectic composer. He is interested in combining elements of free composition, improvisation, process and counterpoint, but also in finding the similar features between musical textures from different styles and cultures. He is interested in the fragmentation and interaction of seemingly unrelated textures and is often influenced by extremes in the context of the same work: quiet/loud, tonal/post-tonal, rhythmic complexity and simplicity. His textures and sound worlds combine aspects of 20th century concert music and the folk and popular music of Argentina, Brazil, the Middle East and the US. He is especially interested in putting these folk materials through harmonic and rhythmic processes to come up with new hybrid sound worlds.

www.noamfaingold.com

Kathy is in the second year of her PhD researching the interface between music aesthetics and critical theories of language, predominantly in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Kathy is interested in how the socio-political aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking on language and subjectivity, as well as its reception in more recent critical and social theory, is of significance to the philosophy and aesthetics of music. Her thesis therefore aims to contextualize Nietzsche’s thinking on music within the broader trajectory of the critique of language and metaphysics. Although it is Nietzsche’s philosophy and aesthetics that forms the main focus of Kathy’s research at the moment, she is also interested in relating and comparing this to conceptions of music and language in philosophers and composers such as Wagner, Schoenberg, Heidegger and Adorno.

Prior to commencing her PhD, Kathy studied music at King’s College Cambridge and then completed an interdisciplinary Masters ‘Critical Methodologies’ at King’s College London. The MA enabled Kathy to study critical and social theory alongside music and literature, and her dissertation examined the role of music and the aesthetic in the criticism of Edward W. Said. A condensed version of this dissertation is now published in Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 31:3 (Edinburgh: EUP, 2008).

katherine.fry@kcl.ac.uk
 

Kieran is currently in the 3rd year of his PhD, entitled Tragic Narratives: The overtures of Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven. His thesis looks at the way overtures relate to the drama of the opera concentrating specifically on tragic operas. The first and second chapters focus on Gluck's Alceste and Iphigenie en Aulide, suggesting links between the reforms that were taking place in spoken drama and painting, and the so-called reform operas of Gluck and Calzabigi. Through a contemporary understanding of tragedy and fate, it shows the overture functioning as an enigmatic tableau that does not attempt to foreshadow the details of the plot, but opens up to the listener the opera's tragic musical space. The third chapter looks at Mozart's Don Giovanni. Through a thorough consideration of Don Giovanni's problematic and ambiguous role as hero, it questions whether the opera can be considered tragic and how this affects our perception of the overture, which anticipates Don Giovanni's decline. The final chapter focusses upon Beethoven's Egmont overture, which differs from the earlier examples as it introduces a play rather than an opera. I attempt to assess the difficulties and differences between the two mediums, and how perceptions of tragedy - and as a result musical narratives - are beginning to change.
 
Kieran’s other interests include film and pop music.
 
Email: kieran.hulse@ntlworld.com

Mats studied undergraduate psychology at the universities of Würzburg and Amsterdam from 2005 to 2008, before graduating from Goldsmiths in 2009 with a Master’s in Music, Mind and Brain (www.gold.ac.uk/pg/msc-music-mind-brain). Equipped with a strong background in experimental psychology, he has run neurocognitive studies investigating the role of background music in vocabulary learning (under the supervision of Annette de Groot, in Amsterdam) and the neural correlates of music-induced emotions (under the supervision of Stefan Koelsch, in Berlin). On completing his Master’s, Mats went on to read music at postgraduate level and gained teaching experience at Goldsmiths before being offered a fully funded PhD position at King's College, London - which he took up in June 2010.

‘Shaping Music in Performance’ is a King’s based research project and part of the nationwide, AHRC-funded, Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP). Its aims are to shed light on the notion of ‘shape’ or ‘shaping’ as used by performers, listeners, critics, composers and music scholars in a variety of ways. Mats’ particular role within this project is to clarify and investigate performers’ and listeners’ sense of shape in more detail, and for this purpose he aims to conduct psychological experiments designed to tease out the relations between elements of musical sound and our perceptions and visualizations of them.

For further information, or to take part in a study, please send Mats an email at mats.kussner@kcl.ac.uk
or visit the CMPCP website at www.cmpcp.ac.uk.
 

Kyoung-Woo Lee is an SPNM shortlisted composer. Born in Suwon, Korea, he studied composition with Chan-Hae Lee at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea (BA, MA), and finished his MMus degree with Kenneth Hesketh at the Royal College of Music, London. He is currently doing his PhD in composition with Robert Keeley at King’s College, London.

Alexandra Papadopoulos was born in Athens. She completed her Bachelor’s degree at the Royal College of Music in 2001. Between 2001-2003 she studied with the Hungarian pianist Imre Rohman at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where she concluded a postgraduate diploma in piano performance.
 
She has participated in master classes with important performers such as Yonti Solomon, Bernard Roberts, Peter Katin, Roger Vignoles and Karl-Heinz Kammerling. She has performed around Europe, both as a soloist and as a member of a piano duo, and as a musician for the contemporary dance company ‘Chameleon’. She is a frequent guest at the Steinway Hall concert series in Salzburg. Finally, with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture, she is organising a Greek artists’ festival at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano in Italy.
 
At the same time, her interest in understanding music in performance has driven her towards musicological research. In 2003 she completed a Master’s Degree at King’s College London in historical musicology. She is currently working towards a PhD on the concept of ‘persona’ in Mozart's piano concertos under the supervision of Dr. Cliff Eisen. Her research focuses on the attribution of meaning, the reception of authorship and the understanding of multiple interpretations in the above pieces.

Steve grew up in Northern California, completed his BA at Amherst College, his MA at Sussex University, and a further MMus at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He then worked in musicians' management in New York for two years, before coming to King's College London to pursue his PhD in composition. His music combines harmonically driven musical discourse with quotidian noises and anti-musical staged events, experimenting in particular with the pacing of their juxtapositions and superimpositions. His harmonic language itself is built from juxtapositions and superimpositions of simple, often diatonic, building blocks. Both the blocks themselves and the relations between blocks change at varying rates over the course of a piece. Speech melodies of banal utterances, as well as melodic material from Korean, Burmese, Cuban and South African traditional vocal musics and popular music, also influence the contours of lines in his scores.
 
Steve is interested in what other disciplines can bring to the understanding of musical discourses, and is currently investigating the different types of flow of a body through space and time described by Laban Movement Analysis.
 

Miriam received her undergraduate degree in Music from Christ Church, Oxford before coming to King’s for the MMus course. She is currently reading for a PhD on performance style in recordings of Webern from the 1930s to the present day. Her thesis aims to combine empirical approaches to performance analysis with historical and psychological perspectives to gain a rounded and multidimensional understanding of the subject.
 
Since commencing her PhD studies, she has given a number of papers at conferences including the 6th European Music Analysis Conference in Freiburg and the Adorno and Performance conference in Manchester. Her wider interests include music psychology, 20th-century and contemporary music, popular music, electronic dance music and critical theory.

On completing a BA (Hons) in Music and French at the University of Exeter, Diane decided to broaden her musical background by studying for a MMus in performance at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Here, Diane specialised on the violin: her dissertation provided a translation and critical commentary on the Méthode de violon (1803) written by the Paris Conservatoire triumvirate Baillot, Kreutzer and Rode. She presented her findings at the York Gate seminars hosted by the Royal Academy of Music (2002). Diane was then invited to join the RAM panel to discuss the uses of pedagogy with the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki via video-link in 2003. The interest generated at these events encouraged Diane to extend her Masters research into a PhD thesis. She aims to assess the pedagogical value of the Méthode and its influence on repertoire, composers and performers of the era. Through the Méthode Diane intends to examine teaching practice at the Paris Conservatoire and uncover teacher-pupil relationships of some of the most formative and influential 19th-century French violinists. Diane’s research is complemented by a career as a violin teacher and performer.

After graduating from the University of Birmingham working on Schoenberg and Adorno, Jun Zubillaga-Pow completed a Masters in Critical Methodologies and obtained an overall distinction for his work on Modern French Theory and musical reception. As an expansion of his Masters dissertation, Jun’s research thesis will be a formulation of a new theory of understanding aural perception via Lacanian psychoanalysis and philosophy. The project will be an attempt of juxtaposing empirical evidences from cognitive psychology and psychoanalytic theories of the Lacanian school in order to justify the phenomenal correlation between aural perception and musical meaning.

Other than his research interests in critical musicology, Jun has presented papers on sexual politics, electronic dance culture and the contemporary history of music in Singapore, Argentina and France. He is currently working on a book project on the history of art music in post-Independence Singapore.
 
jun.zubillaga-pow@kcl.ac.uk