We’re delighted to have been offered the opportunity to be involved in the 2nd annual Music and/as Process conference, this year hosted by our institution, Canterbury Christ Church University. As part of our preparatory work for the conference, we have taken part in a short interview about our experiences so far:
Why did you apply for the internship?
A: I wanted to expand my skillset, in a practical sense, regarding using social media and researching effectively. I also want to engage in a wider academic community and be active within it. I see my role in the internship as a continuation of my undergraduate studies, further developing skills I have been honing on the BMus course.
K: I want an inside and in depth look into how conferences work for my future in academia. The knowledge and experience I will obtain during the internship, and the conference itself, provides a stepping-stone between my undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Further to this, I will develop my skills in arts and events management.
What has it been like so far? What have you done?
A: We are still in the first week of the internship, so we have been ‘finding our feet’ and assisting in the final preparatory stages while beginning to develop a plan for our own research. I’m really looking forward to immersing myself in it all!
K: It’s been a strange but fun experience making the transition between being students and then staff members, albeit for a matter of weeks! The prep work we’re doing is good fun, and it’s rewarding to see everything come together, but I’m looking forward to beginning our research.
What are you looking forward to during the conference?
A: I’m looking forward to getting behind a camera to document the conference, and then editing the footage and seeing it all come together. There are a number of individual talks I’m also looking forward to. Overall, I’m excited to be involved in a project involving so many different aspects.
K: I’m looking forward to completing the variety of tasks we have in front of us over the next five weeks, from laminating to creating critical programme notes! Everything we’re doing is helping develop transferable skills while we, at the same time, help create a really great conference. As well as this, there are some really interesting topics being presented in the conference, so I’m looking forward to catching as many of these as possible.
What kinds of papers are being offered at the conference?
The papers being offered during the conference cover a huge range of compositional style (including graphic, open and ‘conventional’ notation) and musical genre, and cover music form the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present day. It will be really interesting to see how less recent music is reimagined using more contemporary styles of analysis. Each paper offers something new to the field of process, including how it may be perceived, or created in the first place. These concepts are explored in relation to a huge variety of musical works.
What kind of research will you be undertaking?
We will refer to existent research to fully grasp the subject area in preparation for our own original research. The preparation of programme notes for the Keynote concerts will rely on research of similar works and performances, as well as knowledge of the composers’ earlier works, and the performers’ styles.
Music and/as Process 