Prof. Eric Clarke

The sixth SysMus Interview was conducted with Prof. Eric Clarke in June 2021. Since 2007 Eric Clarke has been the Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford where he researches and teaches in several areas within the psychology of music, music theory, and musical aesthetics/semiotics. He is the author of a monograph Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (OUP, 2005), co-author with former colleagues Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts of Music and Mind in Everyday Life (OUP, 2010), co-editor with colleagues from CHARM of the Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (CUP, 2009), co-editor with CMPCP colleague Mark Doffman of Distributed Creativity (OUP, 2017), and co-editor with David Clarke (Newcastle University) of Music and Consciousness (OUP, 2011) and with Ruth Herbert (University of Kent) Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities (OUP, 2019). He has published widely in journal articles and book chapters on topics including expression in performance, the perception and production of rhythm, musical meaning, the relationships between music and language, the analysis of pop music, the history and aesthetics of recorded music, music and the body, music and consciousness/subjectivity, and music and empathy. His current work includes a five-year AHRC research project (2016-21) on Transforming 19th-Century Historically Informed Practice (PI Claire Holden).

LP (Landon Peck): How did you become interested in systematic musicology and music psychology in particular?

EC (Eric Clarke): I first went to university to study neurobiology, and within my first year changed to music for a variety of reasons – so I had always had psych/neuro interests, as well as developing interests in musical structure through learning about music analysis. In my final year at the University of Sussex I was fortunate to have some classes on the psychology of music with an extraordinary man called Christopher Longuet-Higgins – a Royal Society Research Professor of Artificial Intelligence, who was also a very keen and skilled amateur musician, and had written – as far back as the 1960s – some extremely original papers on modelling listeners’ sense of tonality and rhythm. These classes fired my interest for the possibility of thinking about musical materials not just from an analytical perspective, but also from a psychological perspective, something that I pursued to some extent in my masters degree. And during that masters degree I came across the work of a psychologist called Henry Shaffer at the University of Exeter, who was just starting to do ground-breaking research on rhythm and timing in musical performance. Having been to visit him, and seen what he was doing, I then with his encouragement was accepted to the psychology department at Exeter to do my doctoral research.

LP: What experience has impressed you in a way that still has an influence on your career today?

EC: I was really impressed by the way in which both Christopher Longuet-Higgins and Henry Shaffer took complex questions (the perception of metre and tonality, the properties of complex motor skills and the nature of timing control), investigated them systematically and rigorously, and then wrote about them in plain language that avoided unnecessary jargon, and tried to convey even the most complex ideas in simple terms. It is not the only way to write, of course – and I also appreciate and enjoy writing from arguably the other end of the spectrum, as for instance by Theodor Adorno – but it is something that has remained an influence on my own writing, though I’m not at all sure that I always succeed in being true to that influence!

LP: How has the field of music psychology, or systematic musicology more broadly, changed since you started teaching and conduction research?

EC: When I started my doctoral research in 1978, the ‘modern’ psychology of music was only just taking shape. The journal Psychology of Music, already existed, but none of the other journals that we now have did (such as Music Perception, Musicae Scientiae, Psychomusicology, Empirical Musicology Review). So the field was extremely open and sparsely populated – which was a fantastic opportunity in many ways. And most of the psychology of music research was going on in psychology departments, by psychologists, rather than in music departments. When I was appointed to my first job at City University, London, in 1981, I think that may have been the only psychology of music job in a music department in the UK. That has changed dramatically, with psychology of music jobs now in many UK music departments – as well as elsewhere. And that also meant that there were very few music degrees that had any element of the psychology of music – though some universities (such as Keele, where John Sloboda was in the psychology department) did do so through inter-subject collaboration. So in 1981 it was very rare to find the psychology of music on the curriculum in a British university.

LP: Where do you see the field of systematic musicology heading in the near future (5-10 years) and beyond? Fifty years from now?

EC: It seems almost inevitable that ‘big data’ will play a ‘big role’ in systematic musicology in the near future – as it already is doing. The availability of huge amounts of data from people’s musical behaviours in everyday life – through the internet most obviously – represents a goldmine of a kind that until recently was unthinkable. And it makes possible the analysis of very widespread musical behaviours (both their commonalities and their differences) in an unprecedented manner. The person who perhaps more than any other single individual pointed out the exciting possibilities of big data, in the form of corpus studies, was David Huron – and he was already doing that quite a long time ago. His initiative in that respect definitely paved the way. I also think VR and AR technologies will increasingly offer extremely exciting opportunities to research complex and subtle musical phenomena that have previously been too ‘private’ or too prone to disruption in their real-world manifestations. There’s already interesting work of that kind going on, and it’s bound to increase. And in 50 years? I find that impossible to predict: 50 years ago (in 1971) the psychology of music in the sense we know it now didn’t really exist at all – and now look where we are. And with an accelerating rate of change, the situation in 50 years’ time is even more unimaginable than today would have been back in 1971. Sorry!

LP: Is there a piece of research you think everyone in the field should read?

EC: Like the 50 years question I find it really hard to nominate a single piece of research that everyone should read. Part of the energy and health of a field is in the diversity of its material, which pushes against the idea of that single item... One of the great strengths of the psychology of music is the collaborative work that it has fostered, and another is the outstanding contribution that women have made, and continue to make. So I would be encouraging people to read the great research that has been done, and is being done, by [women in the field].

LP: What advice would you give university students today who are interested in pursuing a career in systematic musicology?

EC: I would encourage any students interested in systematic musicology to be bold and adventurous in their ideas, to find opportunities to carry out empirical studies – taking the word empirical in its widest sense, to attend a conference (or two) to experience what research looks and sounds like in its most direct form, and to try to ask a question if there is an opportunity. There is nothing better in helping you to understand what someone else is proposing or claiming than trying to formulate a good and interesting question about their research. And asking the question, and then being the recipient of the answer, is a great way to feel involved and connected.

For early career researchers there has to be one (rather obvious) piece of advice: get your work published in one of the peer-reviewed journals in the field – as soon as you can, and as many times as you can. And try to get your work out to a wider public – not only because it is good for your career, but also because it’s exciting, rewarding and important to find ways to communicate your ideas to (and get feedback from) different audiences. Rightly or wrongly (and there are definitely some significant problems with our current institutional pressures) a strong publication record, and a developing public profile are very significant career factors.