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Call for Practice Based PhD Students
As part of the new 21st Century Music Practice Virtual Research Centre which will launch later in the year we are also starting a podcast for music practice researchers and we want to feature a PhD student in each of the monthly episodes. We’re looking to be as inclusive and wide ranging as possible so you might be working in any musical practice (including the business and distribution side as well as ‘making’), in any musical style (including contemporary performance of historical repertoire) and in any part of the world (although to start with, the podcast will be in English – although we can try to supply language / translation support if needed).
What you would need to do:
- Produce a 20 minute video presenting your research in which at least half of the research element is best presented in either audio or visual content. Of course you can use language to provide context and nuance but we’re looking for presentations where the video and/or the music are key to making your research point. The video should establish a research problem or question and then address it in some way – either a proposed solution or some insights that shed further light on it.
- Participate in the podcast recording – we will produce short and long edits – where you and other participants will discuss each other’s work and other topics that emerge. The short edit will form part of a 20 minute audio podcast and there will be longer video edits of the discussion on the website.
- The website will host online discussions and Q&A about both your video presentation and the discussion in the podcast and you will be expected to ‘check in’ for a month or so after the episode and respond to questions and comments.
- You would also contribute a short list of either practice-based or text-based sources that you consider important to the context of your research so that we can provide links on the website.
How to Apply:
Email podcast@c21mp.org with a 100 word bio – who you are, what and where you are studying – and a 200 word summary of what you propose to do in your video. As the podcast will be an ongoing activity there is no deadline but, obviously, earlier applicants gets considered for earlier episodes.
Looking for volunteers to help establish a C21MP Virtual Research Centre
I’m looking for volunteers to help me develop the 21st Century Music Practice research network between now and May 2026. At the moment there is some content on the website, we have held various events and conferences, there is the Cambridge Elements series and the JISC mailing list. I would like to develop a C21MP virtual research centre involving all of the above plus PhD student support resources and events, visiting research fellows, temporary collaborative research teams coming together to address specific problems through experimentation, analysis and discussion, national and international lobbying and consultation about practical musical research governance and policy and, of course, a podcast.
The idea of the virtual research centre aims to provide an umbrella structure for a research community that is free of specific institutional ties and is a hub for the C21MP community. It will allow researchers into the practices of 21st century music – including practice research – a communal platform for their research outputs and various mechanisms for collegiate discussion and practical experimentation about relevant research topics. It will also provide resources about methodology and methods for research students and early career researchers engaged in practice research and autoethnography as well as links to examples of good practice. It will start with a six month open-access experiment to assess the value, viability and demand for these resource and then aim to replace volunteer labour with some remuneration system – potentially by putting some of the custom-created content and open access to community participation on a subscription basis (either institutional or individual). However the development of the idea will depend on how much interest and engagement there is and will be determined by the whole community of participants.
Please get in touch if you can spare a few hours a week and have skills in any of:
- Website design and maintenance (WordPress at the moment but open to change)
- Podcasting
- Video making and/or editing at a relatively basic level – especially distance-based.
- Building an archive of useful research resources
- Event planning management and support
As mentioned, this is on a volunteer basis to start with but the idea is to create a viable and sustainable financial model as part of this initial phase which would provide some levels of remuneration for the centre’s administration in the second half of 2026.
Please email me if you are interested and we can discuss it further.
About
Most academic research events or publications that use the term ‘music’ in their title (without an epithet such as ‘popular’) refer to western art music but that is a tiny subset of the music that is played and listened to in the 21st century. Indeed, the musical lives of contemporary musicians are far more inter-disciplinary than the academics who study them. This research network was established as a contribution to several recent trends towards more inter-disciplinarity in the academic study of music. By organising a series of study days about quite broadly defined themes the aim is to bring together academics and practitioners from a range of musical cultures – popular music, musical theatre, performance studies, music for visual media, recording, electronic and electroacoustic music, live sound, ethnomusicology and composition.
The focus on practice is also important in that it highlights the idea that music is a process or an activity rather than a thing. That doesn’t dismiss the music itself, but it does suggest a study of the ways in which listeners, composers and performers interpret the sound as opposed to the study of certain intrinsic features in a score. Indeed it’s not an ideological attempt to oust this more traditional approach to studying music, simply an attempt to continue a trend to see both flourish.
The 21st Century Music Practice Research Network was established by Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas of the University of West London in the summer of 2016. The aim is to encourage and disseminate research and scholarly collaboration that includes all areas of contemporary musical activity. In particular the network will seek to stimulate discourse between disciplines: bringing together scholars from popular music, musical theatre, performance studies, music for visual media, recording, electronic and electroacoustic music, live sound, ethnomusicology and composition to discuss broad themes that are relevant across subject boundaries.