Research Seminars

What's in your musical DNA?

Antony Pitts, Royal Academy of Music

Tuesday 25 March 2009, 16:00, Room 105

Abstract

Making a multi-dimensional index of music, musicians, and music-making linked to online and offline resources, and using it to display and navigate a timeline of musical history, the life-cycle of any piece of music from any genre or period, and the musical profiles of individuals and organizations.

Bio

Antony Pitts sang as a boy in the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace, and then in a rock group. Since gaining First-Class Honours in Music at New College, Oxford in 1990 he has forged parallel careers as composer, director, producer, and teacher. His own music has been premiered in London's Wigmore Hall and Westminster Cathedral, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, and the Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal in Berlin, and recorded for Hyperion, Naxos, and Harmonia Mundi; his 40-part motet XL and The Naxos Book of Carols are published by Faber Music. He founded and directs the ensemble TONUS PEREGRINUS with a repertoire ranging from the earliest mediaeval polyphony to Tears for Fears's Mad World; their debut CD hit the top of the classical charts and won a Cannes Classical Award. He was a BBC Senior Producer, working at Radio 3 from 1992 to 2005; he received the Radio Academy BT Award for a live interactive internet experiment in 1995, devised an 18-hour history of Western music for the turn of the Millennium, and was awarded the Prix Italia in 2004. Since 1999 he has taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London where he is currently Senior Lecturer in Creative Technology; his long-standing research interest in the nature of musical, historical, and aesthetic time forms the basis for the musicDNA project. http://www.cd.tp/