Friday 20 May 2022
Dr Mike Dines and Dr Brian Inglis, in association with the international network Music, Spirituality and Wellbeing (MSW)
From Lady Gaga and Leonard Cohen to Arvo Pärt and Galina Ustvolskaya via John Coltrane, musicians working in various genres have notably explored spiritual themes and/or made music with spiritual intention. Music without such intentions can also be received in a spiritual context. How does spirituality manifest in musical terms through different genre lenses? How can such radically different sounds purport to have, or achieve, similar aims? To what extent can spirituality be de-coupled from religion?
Concert Room, Block Grove B, Middlesex University
The Burroughs, Hendon, London NW4 4BT, UK
9.50am Welcome
Dr Mike Dines
10-11am Session 1: Conceptual Frameworks
Dr Brian Inglis (Middlesex University): Music, Spirituality and Mysticism
Prof Fae Brauer (University of East London): Composing ‘Symmorphies’: Chromaticism, Astral Vision and Kupka’s Cosmological Abstractions
COFFEE BREAK
11.15am-12.45pm Session 2: Popular musics across time & place
Prof. June Boyce-Tillman (North West University, South Africa): Songs of the subjugated – The sacred Victorian bourgeois ballad
Mike Dines (Middlesex University): Tracing the Sacred Thread: Exploring the Sonic Theology of Krishnacore
Matthew Williams (Bristol University): Stormzy and the Spiritual Re-enchantment of our Secular Age
LUNCH BREAK
1.30pm CONCERT featuring Middlesex University Choir
2.15-3.15pm Session 3: Global Perspectives
Keith Thomasson: Nurturing connectivity: learning songs from the global church
Prof. Lily Chen-Hafteck (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) and Claire Hafteck (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HK): Connecting the Physical and Spiritual Experience of World Music: A Case Study on Jamaican Dancehall
TEA BREAK
3.30-4.15pm PERFORMANCE BY & DISCUSSION WITH THE DARK MOON ENSEMBLE
Emma Francis (clarinet)
Nigel Sanders (piano/synths)
4.15-5.45pm KEYNOTE PANEL
Georgina Gregory (University of Central Lancashire) Popular Music: Ubiquitous Spiritualities
Prof. Richard McGregor (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland/University of Cumbria)
‘Songs that seem to come from nowhere’: Compositional inspiration and spirituality may share a common root, but can we talk about them in the same breath?
Moderated by June Boyce-Tillman
5.45pm BOOK LAUNCH: Exploring the Spiritual in Popular Music: Beatified Beats ed Georgina Gregory & Mike Dines (Bloomsbury, 2021)
6.15pm DRINKS RECEPTION
6.40pm PERFORMANCE by Middlesex University popular music students
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/exploring-the-spiritual-in-popular-music-9781350086944/