Music Planet - exploring research through music

Music Planet explores the broadest concepts of Environment and Music. The series will draw on academic research across all disciplines from arts to social science and science to present new concepts that have an impact on all society. The series will present the research messages with reflections made through the performing arts from classical through to new contemporary music. From the comfort of the well-known to explorations in improvisation with both traditional and new composition Music Planet will challenge you to think deeper about life and your planet.

Throughout the centuries, artists have used their chosen media to reflect on nature and human reaction to it. From personal experiences to depictions of catastrophic events works have been created to try and bring sense to natural environments and our place within them. Music Planet takes its theme from these reflections. It will present a series of performance events to reflect on environment in its broadest sense. Some events will focus on Environment in terms of natural elements such as climate and societies response to changes in climate others will explore societal attempts to control environments.


Each event is co-presented by artists together with groups of academics from the arts, social sciences and sciences in order to allow relevant aspects of academic research to be explored. The events are designed to be co-participatory with public audience becoming engaged with the delivery of the event. Before, during and after each event there will be on-line information for exploring further the academic research story behind the events.

Music Planet grew out of an idea that Dr Richard Bates had to perform some of the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davis’ works and link into climate research being conducted by the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Sir Peter was an active campaigner on climate issues and cared passionately about the environment of his adopted homeland, Orkney. His music often explores sounds from natural environments and provides an inspiration to us all. From early discussions with the Music Centre at St Andrews and, in particular with the enthusiasm of Michael Downes, Jill Craig and Bede Williams, Music Planet was born.

The ever growing list of individuals involved in Music Planet include staff at the Music Centre, several Schools at the University of St Andrews, as well as some external organisations.

For a full listing of events, click here.

Light Box - bringing together culture and science

Light Box celebrates light in all its aspects – solar, sacred, scientific, nourishing, and poetic. Produced as a result of meetings between Professor Crawford and McBeath and contemporary physicists whose work centres on light, the work juxtaposes a series of new haiku with specially taken photographs. The relation between poems and pictures is often teasingly oblique: neither simply illustrates the other. Instead, they ‘resonate’ together, each enhancing the other.

Exactly 150 years ago the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published his most influential paper on electromagnetism (a paper crucial to Einstein). Maxwell had a scientific instrument called a ‘light box’. Nineteenth-century scientists sometimes wrote of light ‘resonating’. The new Light Box was produced after the poet and the photographer met leading physicists who work in optoelectronics.

 Robert Crawford and Norman McBeath discussing
using coumarin as part of a new photographic process.

'One of the physicists was the late Professor John W. Allen, who led a team that invented the world’s first practicable LEDs in 1961. Though his early scientific papers are now archived in the Science Museum in London, John Allen’s story is not well known. When Crawford and McBeath met Professor Allen, he showed them some of his early LEDs, which were then called ‘crystal lamps’. Norman McBeath’s remarkable portrait photograph of John W. Allen is part of Light Box, and the accompanying haiku sums up Robert Crawford’s sense of this modest, tenacious inventor who, more than fifty years after his innovative work on LEDs, was still in 2015 developing in St Andrews new ways of working with light.

Another pioneering scientist involved in Light Box is Professor Ifor Samuel, who leads the Organic Semiconductor Optoelectronics Research Group in the School of Physics & Atronomy, and whose work has involved perfecting new light-emitting materials. Several members of Professor Samuel’s group worked with the poet and photographer. One of the physicists, Vietnamese chemist Hien Nguyen who has synthesized for the first time a new form of the chemical coumarin, made her discovery available to Scottish PhD student Stuart Thomson who worked with Norman McBeath to use this chemical for the very first time in a photographic process. The result was juxtaposed with a haiku entitled ‘Aton’ (named after the Aton or Aten – the ancient Egyptian sun god) and features in Light Box.  

Light Box is available to view in the Special Collections Department of St Andrews University Library, but it is also published free online in a digital version:
https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/digitalhumanities/node/195

More about Light Box: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/stories/2015/light-box/

Commissioned by the University of St Andrews for the UNESCO 2015 International Year of Light and launched at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 23 February 2015, Light Box is an artistic collaboration between poet Professor Robert Crawford, School of English, and photographer Norman McBeath, many of whose photographs are in the collections of the National Portrait Galleries in London and Edinburgh.

Following on, the 'Loch Computer' project brings together writers, artists, computer scientists, humanities scholars and digital curators to ponder the meaning of remoteness and connectedness in the digital age. It is funded by a Scottish Government Arts & Humanities Research Network Award from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The project crosses traditional boundaries between arts and sciences, as well as between scholarship and creative practice.  

The project led to an exhibition at the Edinburgh College of Art, and an artists's box book by Robert Crawford, The Book of Iona, published by Birlinn Ltd.

The Fair Intellectual Club

Research by the School of English’s Professor Robert Crawford into the first of the great city rivalries of the English-speaking world – that of Edinburgh and Glasgow – has inspired a play by the comedian Lucy Porter.

The Fair Intellectual Club produced by Stellar Quines and directed by Marilyn Imrie, was received to critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival 2014, is currently touring the UK and will play at the Women of the World Festival at the Southbank Centre.

Lucy Porter began reading Professor Crawford’s On Glasgow and Edinburgh with the intention of getting some insights into the rivalry between the two cities but ended up being inspired to write her play on reading about The Fair Intellectual Club, founded in 1718. Porter was alerted to the significance of events of the 18th century’s intellectual revolution for women, and began imagining in detail what contemporary women would have made of the philosophical innovations of their time.

Professor Crawford’s book revises familiar histories of the Scottish Enlightenment that are exclusively about men, exploring women’s stories such as those represented in the records of the Fair Intellectual Club, and it is this aspect of the history of Edinburgh and Glasgow’s famous standoff that inspired Lucy Porter to write her play.

Professor Crawford said, ‘whereas clubs such as the Cape Club or the Select Society where philosophers including Adam Smith and David Hume met Edinburgh lawyers, poets and thinkers - were men-only adult drinking clubs, the Fair Intellectual Club was determinedly different. In Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland university students were teenagers of the same age as the Fair Intellectuals — but they were all male. The Fair Intellectuals would have known local students, but couldn’t have joined their university classes. It’s tempting to hear the word ‘Fair’ in the title of The Fair Intellectual Club not just as a reference to the ‘fair’ sex, but also as a reproach to the unfairness of intellectual life in Edinburgh and elsewhere. [Stellar Quines Theatre Company]

The Fair Intellectual Club has further inspired researchers, artists, comedians and thinkers to reflect on their work and performances in light of Lucy Porter’s play (see: the Stellar Quines' blog post from 17 Feb. 2015 and from 18 Feb. 2015) as the place of plays by women themselves continues to be debated in 2015, 303 years after the Fair Intellectual Club was founded. [A stage of their own: why female playwrights are still marginalised]

English poetry goes digital

The study of Medieval and Renaissance English poetry conjures up images of quiet libraries and beautiful volumes, but researchers in the School of English are endeavouring to change this image.

“Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (Faber, 2010), by Professor Don Paterson, twice winner of the T. S. Eliot prize for poetry, and partly a result of discussions with Renaissance researcher Professor Neil Rhodes, is a full-length popular commentary written from the perspective of a practising poet. Through Paterson’s collaboration with World Book Night (WBN) new and diverse audiences were also found for Shakespeare’s Sonnets with the inclusion of a sonnet on the back cover one of each book that was distributed.
Since then, Paterson’s work has been reinterpreted for new audiences and is breaking new ground with the launch of a highly successful The Sonnets by William Shakespeare, a Faber/Touch Press iPad application which features a lightly re-written version of all of Paterson’s commentary, as well as him reading several sonnets.

Collaboration between Dr Chris Jones, researching the application of Old English in the work of modern poets, and Jacob Polley, a practising poet, resulted in several translations of, and new poems in dialogue with, Old English literature. “Livings”, several newly composed riddles in response to those in the Old English Exeter Book, followed by a several new poems published as part of the award-winning collection, “The Havocs” (Picador, 2012), which includes a poetic translation of the Old English “Ruin”, made in a manner that imaginatively restores the damaged, fragmentary nature of this poem.

In March 2013, the StAnza Poetry Festival developed an online Poetry Trail in conjunction with the School of Computer Science, which includes a recording of Polley reading his contemporary Ruin as well as Jones’s poem ‘Borges on the Wall’, a poetic reimagining of Old English in a modern context. The Poetry Trail, available as an App for iPhone and Android, guides literary tourists around the town of St Andrews by use of QR codes at several sites (including local museums, visitor centres, and independent cafes) where the user can listen to site-appropriate poems.

Tweetable riddles, dubbed ‘twiddles’, Jones and Polley’s latest collaboration, is a Twitter collection of the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book riddles in 140 or fewer characters.
 
The Poetry Trail was funded by National Lottery and Creative Scotland and is promoted by Event Scotland.

The exponentially engaging Vanessa and Virginia

Extensive editorial and biographical research on the work of Virginia Woolf by Susan Sellers, Professor of English and Creative Writing in the School of English, led to the composition and publication of her first novel, 'Vanessa and Virginia', a glimpse into the life of sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. The book was published by a small independent publisher in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, Two Ravens Press, and became their most commercially successful publication.
In 2009, it went on to become a Barnes and Noble 'Great New Writing Discovery' and editor's choice in the NY Times Book Review (Paperback Row). It has been translated into 16 languages. At that time, it was also adapted by Elizabeth Wright to stage and premiered in Aix-en-Provence in 2010. It attracted the attention of freelance director, Emma Gersch, who set up a company, Moving Stories, specifically to tour the play, which opened in September 2010 and ran until April 2013, when it moved to Riverside Studios in London. The play has toured the UK, France, Germany and Poland.

Vanessa and Virginia was chosen for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire’s ‘Book a Day in May’ and, subsequently, Susan Sellers has been interviewed for broadcast on numerous occasions including a special 45-minute edition of Woman’s Hour on BBC4.

“Seamus Heaney’s Five Fables” iPad app

Drs Chris Jones and Ian Johnson, from the School of English, have collaborated with Flickerpix Animations and Touch Press on their exciting new multimedia iPad app of Seamus Heaney's translation of Five Fables by the medieval Scottish poet Robert Henryson. Henryson was a master of the craft of verse, who probably lived and worked in Fife in the 15th century. No longer widely read, Henryson deserves proper recognition as a giant of medieval European literature, and towards the end of his life Seamus Heaney translated several of Henryson's poems into modern English, with a view to renewing interest in this neglected genius. This app, and its accompanying animated versions of Heaney's translations of Henryson's verse adaptions of Aesop's fables, which Heaney was working on at the time of his death in August 2013, will continue to find new audiences both for Heaney and for Henryson.
Ian Johnson, an expert in late medieval literature, was recorded reading aloud the original medieval Scots of Henryson in original pronunciation. Users of the app can switch between hearing Johnson's interpretation of Henryson, and Billy Connolly's performance of Heaney's modern versions. Chris Jones, who has carried out extensive research into the use that modern poets have made of medieval literary sources (e.g. Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2006), was commissioned to write a detailed set of interpretative notes set of interpretative notes to both Henryson's original text and Heaney's adaptations.

Seamus Heaney’s Five Fables Is available at http://fivefablesapp.com/

An introduction to the fable, The Two Mice, which was shown on BBC Two Northern Ireland in March and tells the story of a country mouse invited by her sister to taste the delights of the town but finds, to her cost, it is not all it is made out to be. http://vimeo.com/88443256