Transonic

Project Transonic aims to develop performance and network opportunities for postgraduate (MMus and PhD) creative practitioners. The International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS) at Newcastle University has developed a very distinctive strand in composition studies, now termed postvernacular. The areas that postgraduate composers at ICMUS are working in have rapidly moved away from the Western/European Classical paradigms whose protocols are traditionally observed by postgraduate composition departments in the UK, Europe and America. These changes in position have evolved gradually as a result of two fundamental approaches that are prevalent at ICMUS; firstly commitment to Widening Participation programmes meaning that an increasing number of admissions included musicians from non-traditional backgrounds and secondly the grounding of ICMUS’s musicological studies within contemporary discourses in critical and cultural theory. These factors inform a position which recognises that the subcultural forms in popular music (i.e. a non-commerce driven, popular avant garde) are as important (on an international, cultural level), if not more so, than contemporary movements in the European Classical tradition.

There are various established organisations whose services provide the opportunities for postgraduate composers in the traditional domain to get music performed and to make connections with fellow practitioners both nationally and internationally. Because of postvernacular music’s historical connotations with the record industry, such official networks don’t exist for students working in this domain. Project Transonic specifically addresses this lack of support and helps postgraduates at ICMUS develop the connections and experience that would give their work wider, pertinent exposure.