Tuesday 4th July 2023

Speakers

Diana Díaz González

PhD in Musicology from the University of Oviedo. Her thesis about the composer and music critic Manuel Manrique de Lara (1863-1929) won the 2014 Musicology Prize, awarded by the Spanish Society of Musicology. He is a member of the research project “Música y medios audiovisuales en España: creación, mediación y negociación de significados”, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, as well as the research group on “Música Contemporánea de España y Latinoamérica”. He has published in the main Spanish musicological journals, with articles on Spanish film soundtracks during Franco's regime. She stayed at the Institute of Musical Research (London), University of Glasgow, Universidade da Beira Interior in order to develop research activities. She is Lecturer at the University of Oviedo, Secretary of the Working Group on Music and Audiovisual Languages of the Spanish Society of Musicology, Head of the Chair of Cinema, Avilés - University of Oviedo.

Maria Fuchs

Maria Fuchs is a Senior postdoc at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, leading the FWF project "Soundscapes of 'Heimat': Musical Mapping in Heimat and Mountain Films (1930-1970)" and currently teaching at the University of Salzburg. Before she was an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow (postdoc) at the Center for Popular Culture and Music at the University of Freiburg. Her research focuses on popular and cross-media phenomena of music of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially on Screen Music and Sound Studies. She is the author of the book Stummfilmmusik. Theorie und Praxis im 'Allgemeinen Handbuch der Film-Musik’ (1927), 2017.

Conor Power

Conor is in the final year of his PhD at Maynooth University. Under the supervision Professor Christopher Morris, Conor’s research is concentrated on the links between the American symphonic idiom and John Williams’s scores for westerns, war films, and historical epics. Conor has presented at conferences in Ireland, England, Spain, France, and USA. He is on the editorial committee for the French journal Émergence·s, and has published on Williams’s music for RTÉ Brainstorm and a special soundtrack edition of Cuadernos de Investigación Musical. He is currently funded by Maynooth’s John Hume Doctoral Scholarship.

Marc Brooks

Marc Brooks is Assistant Professor of 20th- and 21st-Century Music Cultures at the University of Vienna. He completed his PhD at King’s College London on the conflict between religious, romantic, and scientific presentations of nature in early twentieth‐century German opera. He is currently researching two ecomusicological projects, one on sound and music in contemporary US TV, the other on human-animal relations in British progressive rock. He has articles on television music in Music & Letters, and forthcoming in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the Journal of the American Musicological Association, and is currently writing the chapter on animal studies for the Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies.

David Etheridge

David Etheridge is a final year PhD candidate at Middlesex University. His project is a musicological analysis of Barry Gray’s ‘Thunderbirds’ music. He was awarded an M.A. in musicology from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2017. As part of his M.A. research, he staged a successful orchestral workshop on the music of Thunderbirds, which led to his current research.

He has had a fifty year career in music, originally studying at the Royal College of Music. He was resident bassist at the Cambridge Folk Festival in the 1970s and worked with sixty different acts in folk music. In jazz he has worked with Stephane Grappelli and Nigel Kennedy amongst others. He was conductor and musical director of the West Midland Light Orchestra for ten years, and is an instrumental teacher, lecturer and music journalist.

Tim Summers

Tim Summers teaches and researches music in modern popular culture with a particular focus on music in video games. His work seeks to understand the musical experiences and educations that mass media provide for the huge audiences they address.

Will Farmer

Will Farmer is a composer specialising in bespoke music for television, film and radio. Combining classical training with a love of jazz, Will writes, orchestrates, and edits music for various projects alongside conducting research into music and the franchise.

Lauren Berlin

Lauren Berlin is a PhD candidate in musicology at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, USA, where she also holds an advanced certificate in ethnomusicology. Lauren’s research explores the intersections of television music, broadcasting culture, and transnational circulation. She has presented research at the annual meetings of the Society for American Music, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and Music and the Moving Image. Her dissertation focuses on the televised musical variety show genre from 1945–1969 as a site for the performance of postwar American identity.

Elizabeth Hunt

Elizabeth Hunt is currently studying for her PhD in Music at the University of Liverpool. Her thesis, working title ‘A New Synchresis?: The Recontextualisation of Music from Audio-Visual Media in Live Performance’, focuses on concerts of music from film, television, and video games. This builds on foundations laid within her MRes dissertation ‘From the Console to the Concert Hall: Interactivity, Nostalgia and Canon in Concerts of Video Game Music’. Outputs of this research can be found in her published chapters in edited collections – ‘My Childhood is in Your Hands: Video Game Concerts as Commodified and Tangible Nostalgic Experiences’ (2022) and ‘Video Games Live and the Gamification of the Orchestral Experience’ (forthcoming in 2023).

Julin Lee

Julin Lee is a doctoral research and teaching associate at the University of Music and Theatre Munich, where she is currently working on her dissertation on American television series music and sound in the 21st century. She has internationally presented and published aspects of her work, particularly on HBO’s Westworld. During her affiliation with the Deutsches Museum, her research focused on the intersection of organology and film music studies, which led to publications on the Mixturtrautonium and The Birds. Her paper on the Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer and Blade Runner won the Frederick R. Selch Award at the 2021 conference of the American Musical Instrument Society. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung.

Ana Djordjevic

Ana Djordjevic (Serbia, 1991), received her PhD in 2023 from University College Cork, Ireland, with thesis on music in post-Yugoslav war films, focusing on trauma, nationalism, propaganda and Yugonostalgia. She presented her work in conferences in Serbia, Bosnia, Ireland, Germany, and published articles in collective monographs and musicology journals. 

James Heazlewood-Dale

Growing up in the vibrant music scene of Melbourne, Australia, scholar, and performer James Heazlewood-Dale relocated to Boston to study jazz double bass at the Berklee School of Music and the New England Conservatory on full scholarships. He has since performed with world-renowned artists, including Jacob Collier, Terence Blanchard, and Zakir Hussain, and currently serves as Graces Kelly's musical director.

A recipient of Brandeis University's Provost Research Award, his dissertation research focuses on the intersection of jazz improvisation and ludomusicology. James' work can be read in the forthcoming Fall issue of Jazz and Culture (University of Illinois Press) and a forthcoming chapter contribution in Video Games and Environmental Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan), and he has presented ludomusicological research at several national conferences, including those for the American Musicological Society, the College Music Society, and Ludo2022.

Most recently, James was commissioned by Decca records to write the liner notes to the CD release of The Callisto Protocol and appears as a scholarly guest on Adam Neely's newest video essay titled the "The Nintendo-fication of Jazz."

John MacDonald

John MacDonald is a writer, composer, and performer based in the San Francisco area. After completing his studies at the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, he performed alongside Taylor Dayne opening for Earth, Wind, & Fire, Guggenheim Fellow David Fiuczynski, and David Gilmore. He currently works as a composer and sound designer for video games. Several of his papers on percussion, dance, and embodied musicality are pending publication in the Percussive Notes Online Research Edition.

Jeronimo Sarmiento

Jeronimo Sarmiento started his career studying Filmmaking and TV at the National University of Colombia (2010), took film courses in Image and Sound Design at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina, 2007), and in 2017 received his Master’s degree in the JMD Program KinoEyes (www.kinoeyes.eu), held by Universidade Lusófona (Portugal), Screen Academy Scotland (UK) and Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School (Estonia), specialising in fiction film directing. His professional career has been focused as director and cinematographer. During his academic studies, he focused his research works on the comparative studies between cinema, music and painting art forms. His short films have been official selections in film festivals around the world.