The Voiceworks Team

Carol Watts

Carol Watts co-directs the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck, and leads the Voiceworks/AHRC digital project . She is a poet, and her work includes Occasionals (2011) and Wrack (2007), both with Reality Street, and the chapbooks brass, running (Equipage), When blue light falls 1 & 2 (Oystercatcher), and this is red (Torque). Her poetry has been anthologised in the Reality Street Book of Sonnets, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets and The Ground Aslant, a collection of radical landscape poetry. Her poetic work also explores mixed media – photography, collage and drawing – and has been exhibited, most recently Horrid Massacre at the Bury Text Festival in 2009. Her engagement with the transmission and translation of poetic form across media has led to experimental collaborative work for live voice and dance with the choreographer Kate Johnson and film-maker Roswitha Chesher, In the Fold. It informs her sense of the generative possibilities of the practice of collaboration central to the Voiceworks project, which she has developed with colleagues since its beginning in 2006. She has a particular interest in the place of harmonics and pitch in contemporary poetry, which she is currently exploring in a site-specific sequence of writing that works through pastoral and prime numbers, called Zeta Landscape. Her ongoing collaborative work with sound artist Will Montgomery takes this interest in other directions, with a short piece in response to the work of Luigi Nono, 'Pitch', installed in the Huddersfield worksetting gallery during the contemporary music festival and played on French internet radio.

click here to view Carol's Voiceworks 2010/2011 blog

Julian Philips

The interface between words and music has long been at the heart of composer Julian Philips’ work, whether in song, dance, theatre or opera. Julian has just completed an AHRC funded residency at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, which culminated this March with his widely acclaimed Youth Opera Knight Crew based on Nicky Singer’s opera of the same name. The opera features in a three-part BBC2 documentary this June and follows on from two other substantial works, conceived for the Glyndebourne context. Followers - a site-specific promenade opera devised with writer Simon Christmas, and The Yellow Sofa - a chamber opera based on a novella by Eca de Queiros, with a libretto by Edward Kemp (August 2009). Julian’s Glyndebourne residency grew out of earlier operatic work both with Welsh National Opera - for whom he wrote the RPS Award winning operas Dolffin and Wild Cat, and for The Opera Group – Varjak Paw (ROH Linbury and national tour).

Julian Philips’ work in opera follows on from his wide experience in theatre and ballet – incidental scores for director Michael Grandage at the Almeida, Crucible (Sheffield), Lyric Hammersmith, Old Vic, Donmar Warehouse/West End, and for Chris Luscombe at the Globe Theatre. His full-length symphonic ballet Les Liaisons Dangereuses was commissioned by English National Ballet for choreographer Michael Corder, with whom Julian has also devised a Prokofiev based score for their new production of Snow Queen (Coliseum and national tour).

In song, Julian Philips’ work has been championed by Dawn Upshaw, Gerald Finley, Thomas Allen, David Wilson-Johnson and Susan Bickley; many of his vocal works have received Radio Three broadcasts and been performed at Wigmore Hall, King’s Place and at the South Bank Centre. His song, Blist’s Hill, was commissioned as part of the NMC Songbook project.

Forthcoming projects include new ensemble works for the Britten Sinfonia and Aurora Orchestra; a number of operatic ventures are currently at the planning stage including a companion piece for The Yellow Sofa with writer and director, Edward Kemp, which Glyndebourne Touring Opera will be taking on tour in 2012.

Richard Baker

Born in 1972, Richard Baker received his first musical education as a chorister in Lichfield Cathedral Choir. After reading music at Exeter College, Oxford, he was awarded a Netherlands Government Scholarship for study with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory, The Hague. On returning, he completed a PhD with John Woolrich at Royal Holloway, University of London. Richard is a Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Richard Baker’s compositions have been performed by the London Sinfonietta, BCMG, Britten Sinfonia, the Composers Ensemble, the Brunel Ensemble and the BBC Singers amongst many others. Recent commissions include Written on a train, commissioned by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust for mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn and an outstanding group of young instrumentalists led by violinist Christian Tetzlaff; Munby Songs, a cycle of songs for baritone Christopher Purves and pianist Andrew West; and a work for cello, piano and percussion commissioned from New York-based trio Real Quiet. As part of Richard’s ongoing relationship with BCMG, the ensemble have now commissioned a substantial work for their 2012/13 season, the culmination of a research project into new percussion interfaces for live electronic music performance.

As conductor Richard Baker has worked with many of the UK’s leading new music ensembles, including BCMG, London Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, Apartment House, Composers Ensemble and [rout]. In 2004 he conducted the acclaimed German ensemble MusikFabrik at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and in 2006 he was Musical Director for Labor für Musik:Theater’s production of Franco Evangelisti’s Die Schachtel at Berlin’s Ultraschall Festival. Having assisted Thomas Adès for the Aldeburgh/Almeida Opera production of The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit in 2002, he has become particularly associated with Gerald Barry’s music, and will conduct the Irish premiere of Barry's first opera, The Intelligence Park, in May 2011. Richard has also worked with many outstanding composers of his own generation including Joanna Bailie, Tansy Davies, Michael Zev Gordon, Phil Cashian, Richard Causton, Rebecca Saunders, Johannes Maria Staud, Ian Vine and Morgan Hayes.

Stephen Mooney

Stephen Mooney completed his PhD in temporality and contemporary poetics in 2009 at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he currently works as a researcher and is part of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre there. He is also a poet, part of the performative poetry grouping 'London Under Construction', and one of those behind the small poetry press Veer Books. He is the co-editor of the Readings web journal and co-assistant editor of the PORES web journal, as well as Reviews Editor for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. His poetry has appeared in various places and web-places, and he is the author of DCLP (Veer Books, 2008).

Research interests include contemporary avant-gardist and experimental poetry and poetic practice, temporality, visuality, experimental film, experimental music, performativity, gaming theory.

Armin Zanner

Armin Zanner, born in Glasgow, graduated with Starred First Class Honours in Music from Selwyn College, Cambridge, in 2000 and stayed to complete an M.Phil. on the music of Bartók with Dr. W. Dean Sutcliffe. He subsequently studied singing with Prof. Penelope Mackay and Prof. Rudolf Piernay at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, receiving the M.Mus. with Distinction in 2005.

Armin has taught German Language and Diction at the Guildhall School since 2001 and also teaches ‘Contemporary Specialism’ for singers as well as classes on the performance, poetry and history of Song. He is a Music Studies Tutor and Masters-level Mentor, a member of the School’s team at the international Polifonia Innovative Conservatoire seminars, and in early 2009 helped in the administration of the Vocal Studies Department as Artistic Assistant. He was appointed Deputy Head of Vocal Studies in September 2009.

Recital and concert performances have taken Armin around the UK, Europe and to North America. He was a member of Graham Johnson’s Young Songmakers in 2007, sang for Live Music Now! from 2005-8, took the role of Don Carlos in Campra’s L’Europe Galante on tour with William Christie, and has performed under conductors including Richard Egarr, René Jacobs and Masaaki Suzuki. As a student Armin took part in mastercourses at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, the Franz-Schubert-Institut in Baden, Austria, as well as at the Académie musicale de Villecroze, which awarded him its scholarship to study with his current teacher, Prof. Tom Krause.

He is a regular contributor to Music Teacher Magazine, has written for various other publications including Classical Music Magazine, Classical Singer Magazine (U.S.), and the Music Education Yearbook, and has produced CD booklet notes for Linn Records.

In addition to his role at the Guildhall School, Armin is Artistic Director of the Franz-Schubert-Institut in Baden-bei-Wien, directed by Dr. Deen Larsen. For 2011 he has also been invited to take on the role of Assistant Artistic Director at the Internationale Meistersinger Akademie, a new summer programme in Neumarkt, Germany, directed by Prof. Edith Wiens.

William Rowe

William Rowe was born in London in 1944. After a BA in English at Cambridge, he taught for 18 months in a Peruvian university, returning to do a PhD in Latin American Literature at King’s College London. He taught first at the University of Liverpool, subsequently at King’s London and currently at Birkbeck College, where he teaches in the Departments of English and Iberian and Latin American Studies. He is Anniversary Professor of Poetics, and currently co-directs the Centre for Poetics which he established in 2000. He has held visiting professorships in Mexico, Peru and at Stanford. The Peruvian Congress recently awarded him a congressional medal for services to Peruvian culture.

He began translating Latin American poetry in 1970 and his translations have been published by Cape Goliard, Marick Press, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry in Translation, as well as in a large number of journals. He has been writing poetry since 1970 but The Earth Has Been Destroyed is his first full-length book.

He is the author of more than 10 academic books of literary and cultural criticism, and has done field research into Andean song and into Peruvian shamanism.

Holly Pester

Holly Pester is our contact for the active student group taking part in 2010-2011. She will be keeping us up to date with the collaborating groups’ progress and insights into the continually-evolving Voiceworks project.

Holly has taken part in two Voiceworks series, 2008-2009 with ‘Presidents and Birds and Even’ and 2009-2010 with ‘Wow and Flutter’. She is now into the 2nd year of PhD practice-led research at Birkbeck’s Contemporary Poetics Research Centre researching ‘speech-matter’ and the intermedial in Sound Poetry.

“My first year of Voiceworks was touched by the heady excitement and novelty of working with a composer, and having access to this alien world of music and trained song voices. The final song echoes this in its self- reflective nature and wonderfully experimental, almost laboratory style, form. The second year was equally refreshing in its straight-to-business approach. Matt and I had instantly shared conceptual interests which our singer, Victor, was so brilliantly capable of giving life to. I am equally proud of the playful zest in ‘Presidents and Birds...’ and the sharp intelligence in ‘Wow and Flutter’. Both of the radically different composers I worked with have brought new knowledge to my work that only practitioners of a radically different discipline could give. The collaborative conversations and exchanges of material I had throughout the projects are as valuable to my portfolio as the finished works. I now hope to continue these conversations with the Voiceworks project as a whole, sharing knowledge and ideas with current and future participants, and Voiceworks’ wider audience.”

click here to view Holly's Voiceworks 2010/2011 blog