'Teaching musical composition in the 21st century' LITE project

Professor Martin Iddon begins a new fellowship project funded by the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE)

The project, developed with Scott McLaughlin and Mic Spencer, will run over the next three years (2019-21). From the project description:

'In the past ten years, the world of composition has changed radically: young composers are increasingly concerned with gender, ‘race’, and ability, questioning the centrality of craft or value, seeing no reason to avoid the ‘popular’, asking what connection they can have with a wider social sphere.

They are less concerned with ideas of ‘high art’, or autonomy, or with being labelled ‘composers’ at all.

In this context, the project’s underpinning aim is to refresh of the taught curriculum in music composition at Leeds completely, revitalising modules at Levels 1, 2, and 5. [...]

It achieves this through the development of a suite of podcast resources, workshop sessions with leading professional performers, a series of seminars and conferences focussing both on the teaching of composition and artistic practice more generally, and the publication of a textbook and of pedagogical research and reflection. [...]

It connects young composers with professional performers, and provides them with recordings of their music performed by leading instrumentalists, vital to securing their first commissions.'

Read more information about the LITE fellowships here.