Crossing musical bridges: composers, performers and intercultural encounters

We live in a world of global trends in music where artists blend styles from across the street and around the world. I'll be looking at the special ways that performers and composers collaborate, communicate and create new music in the 21st century. My talk will demonstrate a range of examples for studying musical performance and its texts (notation, audio and video). Central to my research are the voices of practitioners (composers, musicians and dancers) whose perspectives help us understand what it means to be in dialogue with tradition. Processes of creating new music across the perceived cultural boundaries of diverse musical traditions will be explored to show how an intercultural performance practice can be developed. Analysis of musicking and dialogue reveals ways that ideas are transmitted, transformed, translated and learnt through words, movement and sounds. By bringing the conditions of making and hearing, history and culture, to the forefront of research, the unfolding of events at a practical level deals in turn with cultural difference, social practice and improvisation