Fellowship in creative and performance arts at Southampton University

Liz is currently planning the second year of her project exploring English dramatic song. Having established a group of willing victim-collaborators with the recital series last year, she’s aiming to put them together in performances of masque music, with the title the Masque of Moments.

A project with dancer Mary Collins and students from the Royal Academy of Music will finish with a performance in the Duke’s Hall on March 5th. The musicians and dancers will decamp to Southampton and students there to give a performance in the Turner Sims Concert Hall, at 2.30 on April 21st. this will be the end of a Study Day organised with Jeanice Brooks, and Ros King, which will also be the launch of Southampton University’s new Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture.

Liz's association with and love of this repertoire began at the Royal Academy through Robert Spencer's English song class and has led her to collaborate with many of its best exponents over the last fifteen years. Since 1998 Liz has been the Academy's lute professor, and is privileged to work with the collection that Bob Spencer wished to be housed there, the remarkable Spencer collection of books, music and instruments. Pioneering lutenist, scholar and collector of one of Europe's most impressive libraries, he was a big influence on the succeeding generations of early music performers.

From 2003 Liz has been involved in directing a number of research events with the aim of making the collection more known both to students and the general public. She has been active in the Academy's research and historical performance departments and will continue to combine the two, in a creative collaboration between Southampton and the Academy. Concert programmes and research papers in connection with the project will be given in both places.

Liz set up another institutional collaboration in 2004-5, working with musicologists Shirley Thompson (UCE) and Graham Sadler (Hull University) on a programme of largely unperformed works by Marc-Antoine Charpentier for the Grand Dauphin, Louis XIV's son. A concert tour marked the 300th anniversary of Charpentier's death, and involved an illustrious team of musicians who played to sell-out audiences across in Southampton, Bristol, York, Tudeley and Hull. They included Emma Kirkby, Sophie Daneman, Julia Gooding, Peter Harvey, Mark Levy and David Roblou and Laurence Cummings, with a team of recorders, Pamela Thorby, Gail Henessey and Kate Latham. Liz successfully gained Arts Council funding for the tour, and played in the final concert. The birth of her second child in the middle of the performances gave her a chance to share the work with lute playing colleagues Paula Chateauneuf and David Miller. She also arranged an education project to go with each concert. As a lute player playing by definition fairly obscure repertoire, she is very committed to the role of education in enticing audiences into the unknown.

Study Days at Southampton

Beyond the Golden Age: lutes, lute-song and the lure of opera in mid 17th century England

Saturday 21 April 2007

Music Department
School of Humanities: Music
University of Southampton

Turner Sims Concert Hall
University of Southampton

A one-day conference organised in association with the Royal Musical Association and the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, University of Southampton