Research

Creating new music

The RCM’s Composition Faculty, led by William Mival, hosts a large community of staff and student researchers who have won impressive prizes and commissions for their artistic achievements. These include commissions from the Royal Opera House, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Proms, Nash Ensemble and Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Within the RCM’s research environment composers are active in exploring:

• composer-performer collaborations
• cross-arts dialogues
• new media explorations

Composer-performer collaborations

Staff composers Dr Jonathan Cole, Kenneth Hesketh, Dr Alison Kay, Professor Colin Matthews, William Mival, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Huw Watkins have distinguished records in rethinking, transforming and recasting the genres of Western Art music through direct collaboration and interaction with performers and performing groups at the highest artistic level.

The RCM has many staff performers distinguished for their work in contemporary music with today’s composers including pianists Andrew Ball and Julian Jacobson, harpsichordist Jane Chapman, violinists Radu Blidar and Madeleine Mitchell, recorder player Julien Feltrin and many others.

Cross-arts dialogues

Several of the RCM’s composers have forged innovative approaches to music’s role within opera and explored the nature of dramatic interaction on both a large and small scale, and in abstract and non-abstract contexts.

Mark Anthony Turnage and Michael Oliva have worked with the stage on the largest operatic scale, while Dr Alison Kay and Dr Matthew Shlomowitz have explored dramatic interaction in dance and other theatrical media. In connection with the postgraduate‘Composition for Screen’ course, led by Vasco Hexel, the RCM also hosts research into the aestheticsof collaborative creativity in film, as explored through the lens of theory and practice.

Interaction with new media and technological innovation

The RCM’s state-of-the-art studios have encouraged extensive research into the creative potential of new music technologies, and in particular how new tools can interact with new creative uses. RCM composers such as Dr Dai Fujikura, Michael Oliva and Dr Jean-Philippe Calvin are renowned for their engagement with the processes of electro-acoustic music from artistic, technical and aesthetic perspectives.