Since taking residence at Liverpool Hope University’s Creative Campus in March 2010, Milapfest has enjoyed several formal and informal collaboration with the academic staff here, as well as bringing our flagship performances to the Capstone Theatre.
One of our partners, Dr Manuella Blackburn, is lecturer in music technology, and has taken a major interest in Indian music, attending concerts and recording samples of our some of our musicians and performances.
Manuella is currently composer in residence at the Visby International Centre for Composers (VICC), Sweden. The centre is a work and meeting place for composers from the Baltic Sea regions and the Nordic countries as well as the rest of the international world of composers. The centre promotes contemporary music concerts, conferences, seminars, educational and co-operation projects. The centre has so far hosted over 450 international composers since 2001.
Manuella is working on a new electroacoustic music composition using sound recordings from Roopa Panesar (sitar), Kousic Sen (tabla) and a collection of recordings made with the ensemble Tarang (including santoor, mridangam and violin).
Dr Manuella Blackburn has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Early Career Research Fellowship starting in October 2012 in collaboration with project partners Milapfest entitled: Intercultural creativity in electroacoustic music: Integrating Indian music cultural sound emblems into new works.
The project will address the current ‘Translating Cultures’ highlight notice by establishing a framework for understanding processes of musical exchange across cultural boundaries. In this case, the culture in translation is Indian music culture, but in practice the framework Dr Blackburn is developing will be applicable to a wider range of multicultural situations.
Dr Blackburn’s research will focus on how Indian cultural sound emblems signify and communicate within the context of electroacoustic music composition. She defines cultural sound emblems as units of audio information extracted from a cultural tradition different to my own, and distinct from what are to her, as a composer of electroacoustic music of British/Colombian extraction, more culturally familiar and abundant sound sources.