AHRC Beyond Text scheme double success for SOAS Music Department
5 January 2009
The recent publication of the results of the large grants competition of the AHRC's Beyond Text scheme brought a remarkable double success for colleagues in the Music Department.
Dr Lucy Duran and her team of scholars were awarded a grant of £496,872 for the three-year project "Growing into Music: a multicultural study of musical enculturation in oral traditions." This project seeks to explore how children from eight diverse cultures become musicians, or "grow into music", learning to become performers in oral musical traditions. The team will investigate how music is communicated via social and musical interaction between adults and children. In addition to written material, planned outputs of this project include a scholarly volume, a series of interactive DVD-ROMs, and television and radio programmes.
Lucy will be joined by co-investigator Dr Geoffrey Baker (Royal Holloway), Dr Nicolas Magriel, a SOAS graduate and research fellow on a previous AHRC-funded project at SOAS: The Songs of Hindustani Art Music, and Dr Sanubar Bagirova fromthe Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences.
Fellow Music Department member Dr Angela Impey joins the team of Prof. Robert Ladd (University of Edinburgh), whose project, "Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song" also received a large grant in the Beyond Text scheme. Angela will join a team of linguists to study the songs which form a vibrant part of the Dinka cattle-based socio-cultural system.
Both projects begin in January 2009 and run for three years; further details can be found on the Beyond Text sites:
