Music Composition as Interdisciplinary Practice

Contemporary practices in music appear to be increasingly foregrounding interdisciplinary approaches either from individual artists or collaborators. Compositional activity in all its guises – sonic art, notation-based instrumental music, the myriad forms of electronic music, music in the theatre, music for dance, film and so on – may be conceived as a nexus where the practices of different disciplines can connect in various ways, overlapping, bridging, or integrating. This research network was established to investigate this area of practice: what kinds of interdisciplinarity are in evidence here, how are these practices organised/facilitated/led, how is such work created and what might this knowledge add to understandings of artistic creativity?

As part of the research network, a two-day symposium was held at the University of York on 28-29 June 2016. A full and varied programme included presentations from researchers based in the UK and overseas covering themes such as single-person interdisciplinarity, composing interdisciplinarity, collaborative methodologies for interdisciplinarity, the composer/performer relationship and interdisciplinarity. Featured disciplines beyond music included fine art, design, theatre, dance and mathematics, and the keynote, ‘Chimeric compositions: interdisciplinary encounters between music, theatre and science’, was given jointly by Milton Mermikides (University of Surrey) and Alex Mermikides (Kingston University). A day-long festival was also held at the University of Surrey on 7 December 2016, and a one-day seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 28 January 2016.