Public Lecture Series
This is the list of the past Public Lectures in the School of Music. For upcoming Public Lectures, please go to ‘Events’.
2025-26
29 October 2025: Aural Diversity and its Consequences for Music
Professor Andrew Hugill
Everybody hears differently. In his public lecture, Professor Andrew Hugill discussed how the concept of Aural Diversity can help us better understand the differences in hearing experience which affect the ways in which music is created, performed, and perceived. Drawing on research from the Aural Diversity project, the talk illustrated and examined the implications for many forms of music-making and considered how embracing aural diversity might inspire new artistic practices and more inclusive approaches to music.
Watch Aural Diversity and its Consequences for Music
2024-25
30 April 2025: ‘I Got Rhythm, I Got (Some) Music': Reconstructing Musicals as Critical Editions
Dr Ian Sapiro
Dr Ian Sapiro discussed the subject of his Fellowship project, which focuses on the specific challenges faced by critical editors when reconstructing musicals, using his work creating a critical performing edition of the musical Girl Crazy (1930), for the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Performing Edition project, as a case study.
Watch ‘I Got Rhythm, I Got (Some) Music’: Reconstructing Musicals as Critical Editions.
12 February 2025: Rethinking the Clarinet as an Animal
Dr Scott McLaughlin
During this lecture, Dr Scott McLaughlin addresed how to compose for the clarinet in a way that lets the instrument have its own agency and behaviors, to treat it more like an animal that we interact with, than a tool we manipulate. What does this mean for performer technique and agency? And how do we train musicians in this way without undermining existing technique or allowing the music to become simply random noise? Can the clarinet, like a bird, be seen to have its own language of sounds and actions, distinct from what we impose on it?