Music Research Seminar Series
2026-2027 events
The Leeds Music Research Seminars take place at the dates and times listed below. All events will be in person and online (via Zoom). All are welcome.
2026
Semester 1
Using the examples of the Royal College of Music, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the statesman William Gladstone, this paper explores the formulation of musical idealism in nineteenth-century Britain as Janus-faced. It argues that music-making as it was conceptualized had genuine civic benefit, while at the same time it could mask abuses, including of grooming within educational institutions. Because Coleridge's and Gladstone's influences during the century are hard to underestimate, the paper reaches back to Coleridge's poems to analyse how musical idealism was first constructed and to Gladstone's student days at Oxford to understand how such ideas began to spread.
Phyllis Weliver is Professor of English and Research Institute Fellow at Saint Louis University, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Fellow of Gladstone’s Library in Wales. Much of her research explores literature and music in Victorian Britain as mutually constitutive with a range of nineteenth-century discourses. This work has contributed to BBC Two Television in the UK and to the “Essay” on BBC Radio 3. She has lectured internationally, including by invitation at the British Academy and Royal Academy of Music in London, have given the Annual Gladstone Lecture at Gladstone’s Library, and been twice funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA).
Her monographs are Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (Cambridge, 2017), The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home. (Ashgate, 2000; Routledge, 2016). She has edited three collections of essays: The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (Ashgate, 2005; Routledge 2016) and, with Katharine Ellis, Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell & Brewer, 2013) and Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell & Brewer, 2025).
What happens when an opera responds to its audience while it is being performed, and even the singers do not know how it will end? This seminar explores this question through Ghost of the AI Empire, an immersive opera trilogy I created, produced and directed. Reimagining the Japanese ghost legend Yotsuya Kaidan in a near future ruled by an AI empire, this new work brings European opera into dynamic encounter with Japanese Noh theatre, free improvisation and gamification. It explores how immersive technologies, including projection mapping, a 360-degree environment, spatial sound and a gamified audience orchestra, can expand digital and physical creativity, without relinquishing control to algorithmic systems or relying on simulated participation.
Audience members can make choices on their phones that alter the stage action, while an ‘intelligent-stage system’ responds to the 'collective social emotion' in the hall. For example, they can calm or raise a storm during a sea voyage, influencing whether a fugitive reaches land, or collectively determine how a villain should be seduced. Theoretically, this work draws on innovation and collective-creativity scholarship to design new storytelling and audience-engagement mechanisms, and asks how immersive technology empowers new conditions for the audience as a collective to co-create a performance in real time.
Earlier versions of the opera were performed in Edinburgh and Lund in 2025. Building on this project, I ran a human–AI improvisation workshop in Manchester in May 2026 in collaboration with English National Opera’s Tuning into Opera initiative. An October workshop with Malmö Opera will explore co-creative human–AI futures, while a forthcoming collaboration with the Finnish National Opera’s Virtual Stage project will venture into extended-reality stage worlds. This seminar offers a look behind the scenes before the opera’s Manchester opening night at the University of Manchester’s Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall on 6 November 2026.
Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina is a Bicentenary Music Fellow at the University of Manchester, concert pianist and Creative Director at Operactive Arts (a UK-based cultural enterprise for sustainable innovation in the performing arts). As an immersive opera maker, she has designed, co-written and directed sold-out opera shows infused with Japanese Noh and Kabuki theatre, improvisation and gamification. She currently leads the international workshop series, 'Future of Opera', exploring co-creative human-AI futures with opera companies, innovators and communities in Scandinavia, Japan and the UK. Alexandra's artistic practice directly informs her research at the intersection of performing arts, digital innovation, and collective creativity. Her current work harnesses immersive systems, AI and data science to expand participatory and co-creative possibilities in heritage performing arts, and has been published by Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and more. Her vision is to reimagine the future of performing arts, making historically exclusionary art forms like opera more accessible, engaging, and sustainable for a diverse range of audiences.
This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.
No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Mic Spencer (m.spencer@leeds.ac.uk).
How did imperial technologies of biopolitical encampment impact modes of modern listening? In this paper I consider the colonial hymn as a means of negotiating biopolitical strategies of control in the concentration camps of the South African War (1899–1902). Within these spaces of enforced ‘congregating’, communal hymn singing emerged as a form of theological and aesthetic confrontation at the moment when the ‘modern’ concentration camp – or, encampment based on new, racialised categories of the human – was invented. Drawing on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British theories of biopolitical control, enclosure and racial degeneration, I propose that the first colonial concentration camps became heightened sites of imperial ‘sonic congregating’. Hymn singing, as one of the few sanctioned forms of music-making within these camps, thus became a means of responding to, reinforcing and resisting new, racialised forms of mass incarceration, through its ability to mediate (but also re-sound) religious and national identities within interned spaces. Reading (into) sonic histories of colonial violence as a complex negotiation between mass conformity and the agency of collective resistance, I explore how music within interned spaces can be a kind of ‘audible memorialising’ that fosters creative dialogues about biopolitical control and modern identity.
Erin Johnson-Williams is Associate Professor in Music Education and Social Justice at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on decolonisation, the imperial legacies of music education, trauma studies, gender and maternity, hymns and race, and soundscapes of colonial violence. Erin is co-editor of Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse (Bloomsbury Academic: 2022), and Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality (Routledge, 2024). She has also co-edited special issues of the journals Women and Music, Postcolonial Studies and the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. Erin is a founding Director of Southampton’s Centre for Music Education and Social Justice, and from 2024–2026 was Project Lead for the AHRC Hub for Public Engagement with Music Research.
This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.
No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Mic Spencer (m.spencer@leeds.ac.uk).
The talk will explore the conceptual approach behind the creation of the algorithm for Auralisms. It will also discuss the philosophical aspects that inform the parts that structure the model and will introduce the speculations behind the thought experiment: “what would it mean to convert spacetime into sound?”
As mentioned, the creation and development of a speculative model of spacetime-to-sound conversion is one of the main aspects of the research, that facilitates conceptual and experiential approaches to the phenomenon of presence. This model was sketched through an algorithm and lately developed into custom Max-for-live devices that modulated the spatial sound in real time. Within the installation, participants become active centres of acoustic transformation. As they enter and move through the space, their presence generates what I described as aural concavities: localized distortions in the spatial and temporal organisation of sound. The sonic environment is therefore not fixed. It continuously changes in relation to the bodies inhabiting it. Through listening, participants encounter the effects of their own presence as transformations within the medium that surrounds them. This produces a particular inversion of the conventional relationship between listener and sound. Rather than simply listening to an external sonic object, the listener becomes aware of themselves through the changes they introduce into the sonic field. Presence becomes relational and spatially fluid: something that is not simply possessed by an individual, but emerges through an interaction between body, space, perception and medium. The talk will also consider the project's engagement with ideas derived from Eastern philosophical traditions, particularly concepts concerning subtle or multiple forms of embodiment. These ideas led to the development of the notion of “multiple-bodied” presence: the possibility that presence may operate across different experiential, spatial and temporal registers rather than being reducible to a single physical body or location. Finally, the talk will include documentation and examples from the development of the interactive spatial sound composition and algorithmic model.
Constanza Bizraelli is a Peruvian composer, songwriter, producer, sound artist and philosopher. She has released music under the alias CAO, on several labels such as Opal Tapes, Club Chai, Seagrave among others.
This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.
No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Mic Spencer (m.spencer@leeds.ac.uk).
In the early 1970s David Bowie was introduced by Lindsay Kemp, his mime teacher, mentor, and friend, to the work of the French writer Jean Genet (1910-1986). Genet’s fiction and theatre speedily became a resource for Bowie. Today, Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet’s 1943 novel, reads like a database from which Bowie took phrases, stances, and attitudes – all of which manifested themselves in songs like Queen Bitch (1971), Rock n Roll Suicide (1972) and – most famously – The Jean Genie. It is easy to assume that Genet’s influence on Bowie waned after the end of the glam rock era. But this would be incorrect. Phrases and stances, themes and styles that we find in Genet’s writing pulsed throughout the remainder of Bowie’s career from Diamond Dogs (1974) to Young Americans (1975), from Station to Station (1976) to Heroes (1977), from Black Tie, White Noise (1993) to Outside (1995) to The Next Day (2013) – and beyond.
In 'David Bowie and the Pulse of Jean Genet' Denis Flannery considers the formative, pulsing presence of the great enfant terrible of twentieth-century French Literature across the range of Bowie's extraordinary creative career from 'The Jean Genie' to last works and last days.
Denis Flannery is Associate Professor in English at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Henry James: A Certain Illusion (2000) and On Sibling Love, Queer Attachment, and American Writing (2007). In 2016 he co-edited Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence. Denis has published essays on figures that range from Henry James to Ivo van Hove, from Eve Kososfsky Sedgwick to Jean Racine. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to David Bowie.
This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.
No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Mic Spencer (m.spencer@leeds.ac.uk).
Everywhere you look, music is changing—overhauling itself in response to the climate crisis. There are records made of plants, stereos that run on sunshine, streaming services powered like hot springs and cooled inside mountains. There are sector-specific carbon calculators, climate credentials, and emissions audits. There are organizations that size up (and draw down) the environmental impact of music on all levels. And there is a lot of ecological awareness: white papers, green road maps, industry pacts, emergency declarations, sound installations, song contests, podcasts, playlists, and more. We are witnessing a climate-oriented transformation of what music is and how it comes to be, not just what it is about or how it sounds.
What is changing are the basic technological, institutional, and cultural bases that decide how music gets made and heard in the first place. These changes are good. They are needed. At the same time, a variety of factors threaten to get in the way of what everyone wants to accomplish. In this presentation I highlight what is good about the good things, drawing on years of work with people in music who are committed to change. I also explain what is not so good about the not-so-good things, showing how stubborn political economic realities can turn even the best ideas and intentions back into the problems they set out to solve. And I suggest what further changes might authorize the most daring hopes and boldest plans for rescuing the future of music—along with everything else.
Kyle Devine works at University College Dublin, where he leads a research grant on the political economy of artificial intelligence in music. His books include Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, an award-winning environmental history of the record industry, Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, which received the Ellen Koskoff Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, and Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change, recently published by Verso.
Before joining UCD, Kyle spent ten years at the University of Oslo, where he taught music and environmental humanities, and was dean of graduate studies at the University of Winnipeg. He has held visiting fellowships at McGill University and the University of Melbourne and worked previously at City St George’s, University of London and Worcester College, University of Oxford.
This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.
No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Mic Spencer (m.spencer@leeds.ac.uk).