Interview with Laura Tunbridge, Professor of Music
Laura Tunbridge is Professor of Music and the Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Catherine’s College.
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm writing a book about string quartets. It's actually from a performance perspective, because I'm looking at how professional string quartets work as ensembles, how they start in terms of training and traditions and aims, if you will, and then thinking about how the group builds up a reputation, a particular identity for itself, and sustains that through time. I’m thinking about that from a variety of perspectives, as a sonic and social history. What I'm trying to do, as well as the historical side of how musicians work together, is think about how we can describe sound – which is really difficult, but quite important to factor into this whole idea of why we value quartets, or why certain quartets have a reputation for a particular sound world or for playing a particular repertoire in a certain way, or for having a particular ethos.
So do string quartets occupy a privileged position amongst musicians?
They do – it's become quite a privileged genre in interesting ways, because it's got its roots in an idea of making music together in a very equal way. It’s a kind of chamber music making, with a strong amateur life: people who play string instruments will get together to play quartets as recreation. There’s all kinds of ideals around that. But there's also the other side of it, which is that since it became professionalised at the end of the nineteenth century, and because there are so many canonical classical composers who've composed for quartets, it also has become this really idealised form of music making. So it's a really interesting example of something where, yes, it is seen as quite elite on a certain level, but the aesthetics and the ethics of it are idealised as democratic. But that's precisely why I'm interested in it. Because on the one hand, it seems like an archetypal classical music thing that you have to be good at playing the instruments, and you’re then engaging with great music; it's a particularly rarefied form of music and music appreciation. But part of the power of that experience is because it becomes a symbol for a certain kind of equality between parts, and access to an ever-expanding universe. So it's a particularly powerful genre.
Where do you see performance research or performance and research coming together across disciplines in Oxford?
In all kinds of ways! I mean, it's really apparent in the Faculty of Music because so much of what we do has its roots in a notion of performance. We have researchers who are performers, and that informs what they do. But there's also that sense in which we're dealing with an art form which has a temporal and performative dimension to it, and that impacts both what we study and how we study it and how we engage with it. You can think about music in all kinds of ways, which might be script-based, about manuscripts and documents. But another really important part of music and music scholarship is precisely to do with the experience of playing or hearing through performance. So what really excites me is when those things are combined and we can test them against each other.
The nice thing about performance as well is that it's something that crosses disciplines quite readily. So I've worked quite a lot with Philip Bullock in modern languages, talking about song and thinking about translation, but also how we deal with genres that, importantly, combine text and literature with music. That obviously also applies to theatrical ventures, be that opera or musicals or film. And I think there are some really interesting conversations to be had with other disciplines where music may feature. Say, colleagues in history who have an interest in artists and musical worlds, but music as a sounding object isn't necessarily present in their work. And then you have the musicologists, where the sound aspect is fundamental, bringing a historical aspect to their study. So there's all kinds of ways in which performance becomes a way of facilitating conversations between disciplines.
What's your dream for the future of performance research in Oxford?
It’s really exciting to be moving into the Schwartzman, and I'd love to take advantage of facilities like the black box to play around with installations to explore how we experience performance as performer and as listener. There's something rather vague and fantastical in my mind that would allow people to experience being inside a group like a string quartet, and what it's like to be part of that kind of interaction between four people, but to be able to experience that without playing in a quartet oneself. So if I could work out a way to do that, that'd be really exciting!
I will say, I really don't understand classical music (I’m sorry!), but a friend took me to the Holywell Music Room and I went, ‘Oh, I've been missing out on this! This is performance!’ Watching them perform, it was the embodied nature of it, I found it captivating.
That’s really interesting because it's precisely that embodied experience which is why it's so valued by the players, but is also what makes it so engaging in performance. If you just say, “It's a string quartet,” there's a very stuffy image of what that is, when actually so much of it is precisely about how people engage with each other – about how we ‘perform’ and communicate our relationships.
Would you tell us about a performance that's special to you?
There are lots!
You can have more than one if it's really hard to choose.
Yeah, it is really, really hard to choose! So one of them – this is from a long time ago – there's a very famous pianist, Pollini. He did a Beethoven cycle at Festival Hall and had seats up on the platform, so, as students, we could be up very close to him. It was a packed Festival Hall, which is enormous, but being able to be next to the instrument was an amazingly intimate performance experience.
And another one, just for the sake of contrast, was first seeing Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth, onstage, just looking magnificent and being transfixed by him. There’s a sense of being mesmerised by performance, which sometimes captures you, takes you unawares, and is really powerful. So on the one hand, I'm really into the being involved, and on the other hand, sometimes a performance can be really powerful where you're just impressed and there's something about the spectacle of it, but also the artistic power of it, which I think is overwhelming. It's a rather romantic idea of what performance can do.
Sort of two poles, but that speak to one another; they're both about the experience, about performances through the audience in such a fundamental way.
Also that you can have very different experiences of performance and it's not always about a particularly formal set up. And I think within the music world, we're doing a lot around thinking about the different spaces people inhabit and how performance plays out in different ways within those, so that's another aspect of it which really interests me.
And hopefully the Schwartzman Centre will enable us to make that happen in Oxford, as you said.
Yes, I think it gives us lots of opportunities to experiment with that, which is great.
