Ambrose Edmund Field

Ambrose Edmund Field

Prof

Former affiliations

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

I supervise PhD students in:- Composition (contemporary), Culture and New Media, Music in Postmodern Culture. /// My recent PhD students have worked on the following topics:- Non-Western cultural practices in contemporary musical composition; devising new forms and structures for contemporary music; community-based arts installations with industrial applications; composing for heritage sites; the musicology of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; reductionist, long-duration, and minimal approaches to musical composition; realtime and interactive composition with spatial audio; East-Asian approaches to gesture, sound and space in creative applications; Field recording, environment, and soundscape; challenging historical approaches to digital creativity. /// They have submitted projects in the following forms:- academic dissertations, film, new media, performance, and portfolio of compositions. /// For details on my work as a supervisor, please see my profile page.

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Personal profile

Research interests

 

The purpose of my research is to investigate new forms of musical creativity which can engage with contemporary public audiences outside of academic environments.

To make new music which is both innovative and accessible poses a considerable research challenge. I have approached this aim through investigating methods which enable music to be written as a bespoke and site-specific entity, creating pieces which are individually tailored to particular venues, people and communities. This approach involves a detailed acoustic analysis of performance spaces, to help me create new musical works that highlight their unique resonant characteristics. My approach is informed by science and technology, bringing recent acoustic measurement techniques (such as using three-dimensional ambisonics) into direct contact with the traditional craft of musical composition. As a result, I have been able to create new music for buildings which do not currently exist today (such as the construction of new vocal music which is acoustically appropriate to a 500 year old heritage site (2015)), and to create compositions for communities with very specific requirements - such as a commission from the Polish National Chamber Choir "Polski Chor Kameralny” to mark the 80th birthday anniversary of notable Polish composer H. M. Górecki.

I work with human voices, individual instrumentalists, small ensembles, and new-media technologies. My compositions have received recent performances at festivals in Asia, Europe, Canada and the USA, and at venues such as The Vienna Konzerthaus, Chicago Early Music Festival, MUTEK, Parco della Musica Rome, with broadcasts on the BBC and other national and international networks. It has gained three honourary awards from the Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, and is published on ECM Records (distributed by Universal and available on iTunes). 

 

Video examples of pieces written for specific spaces are available here:

Pod Twoją Obronę(2013) | for 25 solo voices | Recorded live in Gdansk, with Jan Łukaszewski conducting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-eAPAleUSVw

Architexture Series (2012 - 2015) | for 10 solo voices | Ebor Singers | Paul Gameson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OksbYjYq9bg

Being Dufay (2009) | for solo voice (John Potter, tenor) and electronics | ECM records
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/field-being-dufay/id304101082

 

Being Dufay, ECM Records

ECM records, being Dufay

 

Education/Academic qualification

PhD, City University, London

1 Jan 19941 Jan 1998

Award Date: 19 Mar 2024

Music Education, University of Cambridge

1 Aug 19921 Aug 1993

Award Date: 1 Jan 1993

External positions

AHRC peer review college, AHRC

1 Jan 20131 Jun 2016

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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