Music Department Research
The Department of Music is the largest centre of ethnomusicology in Europe, offering unique educational and research opportunities. The special character of the Department has attracted excellent ratings for teaching and research, for example in Teaching Quality and Research Assessments, and in newspaper university guides.
The Department owns a number of musical instruments and ensembles (including Javanese gamelan and Thai classical ensemble), and runs performance courses. The School’s main library has a large collection of ethnomusicological publications and sound and video recordings. In addition, postgraduate students of the Department have access to a research archive, and to specialised audiovisual and multimedia facilities, including a recording studio.
Staff and students pursue research on a wide range of subjects, mainly but not exclusively focused on the music of Asia and Africa (projects on Caribbean and Eastern European music, for example, are also in progress). Staff have special interests in the music of China and Central Asia (Harris), Korea (Howard), Japan, Indonesia and Thailand (Hughes), India and Nepal (Widdess), the Islamic Middle East (Wright), the Jewish world (Wood), and Africa (Durán). Music is studied as a cultural phenomenon, and also from analytical and historical perspectives.
Instrumental and vocal, sacred and secular, art and popular, traditional and modern musical forms are all of equal interest. Research methods employed include fieldwork, archive research, recording, performance, transcription and analysis, and composition.
For several years SOAS hosted the AHRC Research Centre for Cross-Cultural Music and Dance Performance. This provided a major stimulus to performance research among staff and students. The Department will continue to promote such performance-based research and to publish results as CDs, DVDs and in written form.
Music Departments Worldwide Activities
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