How not to write a PhD thesis

Hi all,

A very good article about ways to drop out your PhD, what do you think?

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=410208&c=1

Tuesday the 24th

Dear everyone,

Next Tuesday, the 24th of November, I will be doing a presentation on my work.
I will talk about some of my influences, things I've studied and some of my aesthetic concerns.
I'll try to make it interesting somehow...

Hope you can make it!

See you next week!

Carolina.

Seán Clancy Talk 3 - November- 2009

Birmingham Conservatoire 3 – November – 2009

Extra-musical Interests:

i) People – James Joyce, Flann O Brien, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Haneke.

ii) Places – Dublin, Paris, all of Poland

iii) Things – Liverpool Football Club, Literature, (Particularly Irish Literature), Philosophy, Film (particularly Goddard and Haneke), Drinking

Musical Interests:

i) People – Philippe Leroux, Fausto Romitelli, Georges Aperghis, John Cage, Morton Feldman, James Tenney, Howard Skempton, Joe Cutler, My Peers.

ii) Places – Paris for concert music, Dublin for great bands, Birmingham Conservatoire for facilitating these things.

iii) Things – Musical Philosophy, Rock Music, (Some) Spectral music, Theatrical music, Gestalt Theory.

Antecedents to now – Non Formal –

i) Listening to loud fast, heavy music

ii) Playing loud fast, heavy music

Formal –

i) Bmus degree University College Dublin – studies in musicology, philosophy, composition.

ii) Mmus degree Kings College London studies in composition with Robert Keeley, Silvina Milstein and George Benjamin.

iii) Studies at Ecole Nationale de Musique with Philippe Leroux.

PhD Interests - Tripartite approach

i) Theatre in Music – Approaching musical performance in a theatrical manner, bringing performers out of their comfort zone, either through physical virtuosity or mental virtuosity. Theatre can also be literal as in my new theatrical piece Comedias Nuevas.

ii) Musical borrowing – borrowing from our folk heritage (rock music), but not in a literal sense, very subtlety for example, using rock music as a cantus firmus as they did in medieval times with plainchant.

iii) New Approaches to Harmony – based on studies of three key harmonic treatises written by composers, I hope to expand harmonic theory. Rameau – foundations of Harmony, Schoenberg – limits of harmony, Tenney – beginnings of harmonic theory to include microtones, applying these three theories in a spectral sense vertically, but not horizontally (in space but not in time). Expanding this principle and looking at it structurally.

Key Works – Larry Polansky – ‘we have one key work that occupies us for a number of Months/years, this serves as the work that generates ideas for a number of other satellite works until the next key work comes along.’

Whisper, Whisper, Whisper, – many ideas

Spectral harmony (upper partials only).

- Polyrhythm (this influenced most of my works for a number of years).

- Additive process (influenced many pieces).

- Instrumental theatre (extreme difficulty, can fall apart at any given time).

Served as ideas for guitar quartet right up to Nothing/Worse (2006-2008/9),

The Subjects Gaze – few new ideas (cross over piece)

- Beginning of arch form concept (on the macro, and micro levels – breath).

- Chain theory, each section is linked by a pitch class set related to the previous section so that they dovetail over.

- Harmony – each line has its on spectrum based on the lowest note of the given instrument (self contained within each line).

Began to generate ideas for subsequent pieces.

A plague a both your houses

- Approach to cantus firmus

- New approach to harmony

- Graphic notation

I got to like him…

- Deals with all of the aspects of my PhD research on a small scale, new ideas – key work performance due on 30 November 2009.

PhD Composers Forum curated by Carolina Noguera

It is very nice to have this site to share our information, suggest topics or useful links, have personal links to myspace pages and have an additional way to keep involved with the Conservatoire's Research and Composition community. I hope we all use it.

BCU PhD Composers are:

Stephen Barchan, Paolo Boggio, Jamie Bullock, Susan Cannon, Séan Clancy, Simon Cummings, James Dooley, Javier Campaña-Hervás, Edmund Hunt, Dmitry Kormann, George-Emmanuel Lazaridis, Joanna Lee, Simon Lesley, Tychonas Michailidis, Mel Moore, Tim Perkins, Nick Redfern, Andrew Thomas, Sebastiano Dessanay and Carolina Noguera-Palau.