 Good morning everyone. Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. My name's Rachel Harris and you are listening there to some music by Tumani Diabate playing the Chora, which is an instrument you'll certainly be hearing a lot about if you join the music department at Sawas. So I'm going to just run through a few slides that we've prepared for you and then I'll be happy to field a few questions. Hi there Madeleine, thank you for turning on your camera. Okay, good. So first just to orient ourselves in this wonderful institution of Sawas, it is indeed a place of really wonderful diversity. It never ceases to astonish and entertain me all the things that go on here. So this is really core to what we do and what underpins our delivery. We dialogue with diversity. Our music offering is really very global in its outlook and so all of our kind of theory and practice as well as our regional expertise is very global. We're also very interested in providing you with skills. So there is a vocational emphasis in this program. So moving in a little then just to situate music within the School of Arts. We are one small strand of this school. We are together with History of Art and also with the Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Film Studies and there's a lot of overlap particularly with the Creative Industries programs and modules. Teaching staff in the music department, we cover a wide range of global expertise. So my colleague Lucy Doran working on West Africa, myself working in East Asia and Central Asia, Angela Impey, Said Kord Mafi, Ilana, Weds De Cogan and Rich Williams are all teaching within the music department and they have their own very distinctive approaches as well as their regional expertise. You can find all of these profiles on the website so do feel free to look at our publications, what we have to say about ourselves and our work. I've also included my colleague Casper Melville on the list. He's slightly separate because he's actually situated in the Creative Industries and Media Centre but he works on Black music basically in the UK and the US and so a lot of our students spend time in his modules. For all of our staff we are research active and the research projects that we run, the field work that we do, the people we engage with, they all come into our classrooms sometimes literally. So this is just a quick list of some of the projects we've been doing recently. Migration and transformative justice are very important aspects of what we do. My own recent work is on Islamic soundscapes and also on intangible cultural heritage so these are all themes also that come into our teaching. Our work in terms of research and getting it out there extends to actually supporting publications so we have our very own book series published by Routledge, the studies in music which is now pretty substantial series and we're publishing some very diverse and interesting stuff recently. So you can find that online as well. As well as these more traditional academic pursuits of publishing books we're very interested in getting our work out there. So many of us are engaged with other forms of publication like albums, Lucy Doran is a very highly respected producer in the world music scene. Other colleagues, Nick Gray now a research associate is a composer doing very interesting fusion projects. Our new colleague Saeed Kord Mafi again a very exciting composer in Iranian classical traditions so that is an important aspect of what we do, increasingly so. When we say we teach world music, music of the world, ethnomusicology, I think it's important to understand before you get here that we don't just teach about traditional music or folk music you know so when we run courses on West Africa it will move between the the griotraditions for example and then also into contemporary hip hop presentation style, themes, contexts of performance all of that so there really is no division in what we do between the traditional and the popular. Same when I teach on Korea you know I can be interested in these living embodiments of intangible cultural heritage but I'm also interested in BTS and their fans and all of that. So beyond our regional courses then we also teach skills, a very important aspect of what we do, very popular with the students so you can take modules in podcasting, in radio presenting and also an introduction to sound recording. These are really great experiences for our students. Many students actually also take part in the SOAS radio which is a student union run radio station and find themselves you know becoming quite active as presenters there. Musical performance is very important for us really quite central to what we do and so many of our students come to us as active performers, others pick up something new, they get into Sammel Norrie for example Korean drumming or Gendae Wayan and really have a very rich experience performing with our various ensembles either for credit or just as an extra curricular practice both possible so the performance module that we run is very popular and a very interesting thing there's a you know you're quite free to choose your own teacher and your own tradition in consultation with us obviously and then that's examined by a performance at the end of the year and also a reflective essay on your learning experience. So yeah these are just a few of our recent students yeah but a lot of the music making happens outside of the formal kind of module structure you know so so many of our students they come because they're interested in jamming fundamentally they want to meet up with students with different musical skills with different musical backgrounds and so this this is just one of the many encounters that might happen over the year this is some Kajali Koyate originally from Senegal now our Kora teacher and a really lovely guy and with a new album just out doing very well and he's jamming there with Gaio from Brazil a couple of years ago just play you a minute of that I'm not sure how well that comes through on zoom anyway you can get the idea a lot of that going on all the time um fieldwork yes so um our department is really rooted in the discipline of ethnomusicology and fieldwork is very fundamental to our own research and also central to what we're teaching you so we have a module called theory and method in ethnomusicology the way that we examine that is by sending you out to do your own ethnographic research a mini fieldwork project somewhere in London most likely during the course of the the first term and the and the winter break so the students this year are just um preparing their their projects and getting started on their fieldwork and that's a really great experience for them we do try to teach some of the practical methods of ethnography and that of course can also underpin your your dissertation your final dissertation we have a couple of um small grants the the root scholarship and also the john taylor scholarship which students can apply to in order to support them to actually travel elsewhere and do a bit of fieldwork uh usually in early summer uh in order to um contribute that to their dissertation other aspects of departmental life we have a fantastic concert series just um um coming back now as a live experience we were doing it online last year which was you know better than nothing but it's amazing to be back in the brunei gallery now for these so um uh elian quirea i think this this group is actually playing tonight you know they are a very vibrant and exciting uh band and elian is one of our former students now a fellow of the music student uh the music department uh bae bae wang really extraordinary um experimental chinese percussionist uh also teaching chinese percussion here now and she did a gorgeous concert a few weeks ago yeah so all of this stuff is on the music department website so you should be able to find the details of upcoming gigs if you want to see what's on as well as the concert series we have a public research seminar again you're very welcome to to join um these are hybrid this term so we're we're bringing in some quite exciting speakers from all over the world you can either come and listen in our classroom g 52 in in soas or we also have a link for a zoom attendance and we we're advertising those um on the the bfe the british forum for ethnomusicology um email list if you want to join or of course for any questions anything you want to get involved with um you're also very welcome to email me yeah rachel harris rh at soas.ac.uk uh the other thing which contributes a great deal to the vibrancy of our department are the music workshops so these are short courses short practical courses sometimes running through a week of say um two or three hours per evening others are kind of day courses and we run all sorts of things depending um which teachers are around at any given year but um tabla klezmer mongolian overtone singing gamma lamb all sorts of of classes that's some faciles sharkis he's another master's graduate from a few years back now he's teaching the the middle east percussion really sweet guy and a superb musician so again um all the details on the website right so let let's um think a bit about career destinations this is an important one um i've i've already mentioned that ethnomusicology that discipline uh is is really what underpins the department um we have over the years trained uh quite a swathe of academics who are now professors in in universities all over the world nathan there is um based in canada sherry tan uh came to us from singapore um quit a career in journalism in order to work in ethnomusicology she's now based at roll hollow way um as well as um academic careers our our graduates especially from the masters also go back into teaching sometimes or they do a conversion course and go into teaching at school level uh we have people going into media all sorts of media um archiving is an interesting one this is janet top farjan who's now um quite high up in the the british library sound archive and a lot of our graduates um go and go and work their interesting pathway oh this is some syed who's just joined us um after completing his phd so those are a few destinations um of course um music performance is another destination uh quite a lot of our students come as already uh very talented performers and then go on to have quite um uh exciting recording and performance careers so nick mulvey was actually in the undergrad now doing very well and um maya yosef superb syrian canoon player um now starting to really make a mark on the world music scene and there are many more of course um the the third strand of what we do really is the music in development side of things we have a module which focuses on how music works um within the sphere of development and increasing numbers of our students are coming now from a background in development or with interests in moving into that sector and they're finding jobs in in charities you know music in prisons for example in music therapy community music therapy um yeah uh international development projects had all sorts of it fascinating things you know um recent graduates working now on a project in the west and sahara really remarkable things working for unesco of course um quite a lot of our students especially those coming from east asia uh are now working um in some capacity in relation to unesco's um massive project of um intangible cultural heritage so that's increasingly important yeah so just a quick glance at some of the regional modules that we teach that we're teaching at the moment um you can see we we cover uh the african diaspora as well as um africa itself um middle east so the intersections between the islamic world and north africa there uh actually i should say the islamic and jewish world and north africa um sacred sound in south asia really beautiful quite musicological uh module that pop and politics in east asia is um a very fun module i'm teaching this term um it's really incredible how many of the students are either kind of active performers obviously very active fans or you know engaging in the industry in different ways so that's very interesting uh we are interested in border crossing i guess getting out of these kind of regional silos so you can see that emphasis in this traveling on a song module and also um this silk road module that i teach sometimes you know so really thinking about all those musical connections and histories uh going across across the huge landmass of asia as well as our regional modules we also do a lot of thematic modules so i've mentioned music in development for example music in global perspective is really um taking a broad approach to questions of performance you know what is performance um the body as well what does it mean to um uh to use music in ritual context to to achieve altered states of consciousness for example that kind of thing what does music mean in different contexts how do we relate to music instruments all of that yeah so um the music business very popular this is some intersecting with the creative industries um center obviously also global hip hop really uh fun and popular model module and i said lots of fans so just in terms of your choices um if you apply for a place and are accepted onto the program you will get an email uh at some point in uh september inviting you to sign up uh and there's quite a lot of complex detail about you know the pathways that you you can follow so again you know if you if you do come and join us i warmly recommend that you just drop me an email say hi tell me what you're interested in and i can help guide you through some of the options because so as um just has so much on offer and it can be a little bit bewildering sometimes you know just where do you go to choose so um basically as well as our own music modules you have access to other modules in the school of arts so visual arts creative industries we also have an exchange agreement with kings college in london so you can take their modules in i don't know like jazz for example um a language of course so as is is very um important in the languages that it continues to offer so you know that that is quite a challenging one but just an amazing opportunity if you're you're very clear that you want to work in i don't know thailand for example you know so really take that opportunity to to get the basics of the language yeah and so much more from all the other departments yeah so you you spend two terms basically taking these taught modules uh you'll do generally speaking like four modules in each term uh and then quite a large chunk of your time uh really running from may um through to submission in september will be spent on your own individual study so this dissertation is a really important part of the program it's your opportunity to um identify a topic identify a set of questions um and working with a supervisor who you you can certainly have a say in who you want to work with then you will go about doing some original research so so these are you know exciting things to do and i've just um put a list of the some of the topics from last year uh which were really great so you can see quite a few of our our students are interested in questions of media uh and industry so this was an interesting one looking at um um gosh i can't remember one of the music streaming services and and how they engage in new markets so he picked Lebanon as a case study which was really interesting um here also i'm thinking about industry and this question of reissue labels and how does the the western market you know listen to 1970s pop from garner for example um this ghetto classics project is actually um um a student who was working for this development project in Nairobi came to us to get a bit more kind of theory um behind his practice and wrote about his his own project really extraordinary stuff and this was a lovely kind of oral history project so um an american student of of check um heritage who was very interested in in that that period in in like Czechoslovakian soviet era history and did a lot of really beautiful um oral history kind of interviews very original stuff that i hoping to get that published yeah and finally of course um um we we allow our students to do more practical projects for their dissertations so quite a lot of students choose to do a kind of practice based dissertation which will be examined say you know by a performance plus a a shorter amount of words so say four or five thousand words explaining what you do and then a performance so that could be like a new composition or it could be exploring some um some new repertoire something like that so uh what i'd like to do is um just play you a little bit of this extraordinary um project done by nick nars mirgal army a couple of years ago who came to us as a very interesting Iranian tambour player and then got into the this um uh very fascinating sphere of of multimedia new creative practice so i'll i'll stop the presentation here i'll just play you a minute or two of nick nars and then if you'd like to um ask me any questions i'll i'll be here for for another 10 minutes or so to respond to questions okay thanks for your listening short and sweet