Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music

Aims to promote the study of music as performance through a specific focus on recordings. Its activities include a major discographic project, seminars and research projects.

Traditionally, music has been studied as a text reproduced in performance - almost as if it were an obscure kind of literature. By placing performance at the centre of musicology - by promoting a musicology based on recordings and not just scores - CHARM aims to reduce the gulf between musicology and the listener. CHARM addresses three fundamental problems:

* the difficulty of accessing early recordings
* the dispersal of knowledge about recordings
* the need to develop analytical approaches to recordings

arts-humanities.net

Principal investigator
Professor Nicholas Cook
Principal project staff
Professor Eric Clarke,Professor Nicholas Cook,Professor John Rink,Daniel Leech Wilkinson
Start date
Thursday, April 1, 2004
Completion date
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Digital resources created
online discography, library of ex-copyright recordings, digital monograph on recorded music, sound files archive
Source material
78rpm discs, discography catalogues
Publications

CHARM Publications: http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/p6_1_3.html
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance, http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html
* Rink, John, Neta Spiro and Nicolas Gold. ‘Motive, gesture and the analysis of performance’, in New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).
* Spiro, Neta, Nicolas Gold and John Rink. ‘The form of performance: analyzing pattern distribution in select recordings of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 24 No. 2’, Musicae Scientiae (forthcoming).
* Spiro, Neta, Nicolas Gold and John Rink. ‘Plus ça change: analyzing performances of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 24 No. 2’, in Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, ed. Ken’ichi Miyazaki et al (Sapporo: ICMPC10, 2008), 418-27.
* Spiro, Neta, Nicolas Gold and John Rink. ‘In search of motive: identification of repeated patterns in performance and their structural context’, in Proceedings of the Inaugural International Conference on Music Communication Science (ICoMCS), ed. Emery Schubert et al (Sydney: ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet), 2007), 152-4.
* Spiro, Neta, Nicolas Gold and John Rink. ‘Performance motives: analysis and comparison of performance timing repetitions using pattern matching and Formal Concept Analysis’, in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Performance Science, ed. Aaron Williamon and Daniela Coimbra (Utrecht: European Association of Conservatoires, 2007), 175-80.
* Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 'Performance style in Elena Gerhardt's Schubert song recordings', Musicae Scientiae (forthcoming).
* Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 'Recordings and histories of performance style', in The Cambridge Companion to Recordings, ed. Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
* Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 'Musicology and performance', in Music’s Intellectual History: Founders, Followers and Fads, ed. Zdravko Blazekovic (New York: RILM, forthcoming).
* Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances (London: CHARM, 2009). [http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html]
* Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 'Sound and meaning in recordings of Schubert's "Die junge Nonne"', Musicae Scientiae 11/2 (2007), 209-36.
* Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 'Expressive gesture in Schubert singing on record', Nordisk Estetisk Tidskrift [Nordic Journal of Aesthetics] 33 (2006), 50-70.
* Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 'Portamento and musical meaning', Journal of Musicological Research 25 (2006), 233-61.
* Timmers, Renee. 'Vocal expression in recorded performances of Schubert songs', Musicae Scientiae 11/2 (2007), 237-68.
* Timmers, Renee. 'Communication of (e)motion through performance: two case studies', Orbis Musicae 14 (2007), 116-40. [special issue on performance]
* Timmers, Renee. 'Perception of music performance on historical and modern commercial recordings', Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 122/5 (2007), 2872-80.
* Cook, Nicholas. 'The ghost in the machine: towards a musicology of recordings', Musicae Scientiae (forthcoming).
* Cook, Nicholas. 'Off the Record: Performance, History, and Musical Logic', in Music and the Mind: Investigating the Functions and Processes of Music, ed. Irène Deliege (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). German translation in Musik.Theorien der Gegenwart, ed. Clemens Gadenstätter and Christian Utz (Saarbrücken: PFAU-Verlag, forthcoming).
* Cook, Nicholas. 'Bridging the unbridgeable? Empirical musicology and interdisciplinary performance studies', in New Perspectives on Peformance Studies: Music across the Disciplines, ed. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, forthcoming).
* Cook, Nicholas. 'Objective expression: phrase arching in recordings of Chopin's Mazurkas', in Reactions to the Record: Perspectives on Historical Performance, ed. George Barth and Kumaran Arul (forthcoming). Abridged version: 'Squaring the circle: phrase arching in recordings of Chopin's mazurkas', Musica Humana (forthcoming).
* Cook, Nicholas. 'Beyond reproduction: semiotic perspectives on musical performance', Zeitschrift für Semiotik, special issue 'Zeichen jenseits von Bezeichnung. Musiksemiotische Konzepte' (forthcoming). [in German]
* Cook, Nicholas. 'Methods for analysing recordings', in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, ed. Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
* Cook, Nicholas. 'Changing the musical object: approaches to performance analysis', in Music's Intellectual History: Founders, Followers and Fads, ed. Zdravko Blazekovic (New York: RILM, forthcoming).
* Cook, Nicholas. 'Beyond the Notes', Nature 453 (25 June 2008), 1186-7.
* Cook, Nicholas. 'Performance analysis and Chopin's mazurkas', Musicae Scientiae 11/2 (2007), 183-207; also published in Chopin in Paris: The 1830s (Warsaw: Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, 2009), 119-39.
* Cook, Nicholas and Craig Sapp. 'Une pure coïncidence? Joyce Hatto et les Mazurkas de Chopin', trans. Jean-François Cornu, L'étincelle: Le journal de la création à l'IRCAM 3 (2008), 19-21.
* Earis, Andrew. 'An algorithm to extract expressive timing and dynamics from piano recordings', Musicae Scientiae 11/2 (2007), 155-82.
* Sapp, Craig. 'Performance authenticity: a case study of the Concert Artist label', paper presented at the ARSC Conference 2008, Stanford. [web publication]
* Sapp, Craig. 'Hybrid numeric/rank similarity metrics for musical performance analysis', paper presented at ISMIR 2008, Philadelphia. [web publication]
* Sapp, Craig. 'Comparative analysis of multiple musical performances', Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) 2007 (Vienna, Austria), 497-500.
* Sapp, Craig. 'Mazurkas project report', RMA Newsletter (Autumn 2006).
* Volioti, Georgia. 'Playing with tradition: weighing up similarity and the buoyancy of the game', Musicae Scientiae (forthcoming).
* Morgan, Nicholas. '"A new pleasure": listening to National Gramophonic Society records, 1924-1931', Musicae Scientiae (forthcoming).
* Patmore, David. 'The Columbia Graphophone Company, 1923-1931: commercial competition, cultural plurality and beyond', Musicae Scientiae (forthcoming).
* Patmore, David. 'Albert Coates – a forgotten master’, Three Oranges: the Journal of the Serge Prokofiev Foundation (forthcoming).
* Patmore, David. 'Selling sounds', in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, ed. Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
* Patmore, David. The Columbia Graphophone Company, 1925-1931 (Sheffield: Department of Music, University of Sheffield, forthcoming). [CD-ROM]
* Patmore, David. Piero Coppola: Autobiography, Biography, Discography, Sound Recordings (Sheffield: Department of Music, University of Sheffield, 2008). [CD-ROM]
* Patmore, David. 'John Culshaw and the recording as a work of art', Journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections 39/1 (2008), 20-40.
* Patmore, David and Eric Clarke. 'Making and hearing virtual worlds: John Culshaw and the art of record production’, Musicae Scientiae 11 (2007), 269-93.