Research output per year
Research output per year
Accepting PhD Students
Research activity per year
Amy’s research interests revolve around recordings and performance practice, and by definition involve a focus on the 20th and 21st centuries and the cultural contexts of music-making. She has been involved with several AHRC-funded research projects (as co-investigator and core member), and her book From Stage to Studio (Routledge), partly based on her doctoral research, is an ethnographic and analytical study of classical music-making, focused on the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras. She has investigated his recordings and live performances, exploring the issues that arise when comparing these different performance situations. In addition to detailed analysis of the performances, there is a strong contextual aspect to this research which involves interviewing Sir Charles himself, the musicians, producers, and engineers he worked with, and fieldwork observation of the rehearsal, concert, and recording processes. Amy’s interests in both the contextual and practical aspects of music extend beyond her research; her academic career has dovetailed with her work both as a performer and violin teacher.
Amy is a passionate and innovative educator and researcher who specializes in recording studio practices, performance studies, ethnographic approaches to studying music-making, and using recordings as evidence of past performance styles along with their associated aesthetic and cultural contexts. Her work focuses particularly on musicians’ experiences in the recording studio and in live performance contexts, raising questions about creative agency, and collaborative and experimental working practices.
Her unique teaching area centres on performing for recording, enabling students to be as creatively in control in the studio as on the concert platform, and to collaborate meaningfully with the other parties in the recording process. Amy’s teaching explores the aesthetic and practical considerations of performing live and in the recording studio, but these questions also reach beyond the educational context, informing Amy’s research in which she collaborates with a range of professional musicians and production team members to experiment and gain new insights into the possibilities of performing for recording.
Her work is published by Oxford University Press, Routledge, and Bloomsbury, amongst others. She reviews regularly for Gramophone, and her monograph for Routledge is entitled From Stage to Studio: Classical Performance versus Recording. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), co-investigator for the AHRC Digital Transformations project ‘Classical Music Hyper-Production and Practice-as-Research’, co-Director of the Institute of Musical Research (IMR), and co-Chair of the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Music Studies Network (EDIMS), for which she co-authored a report on EDI in Music Higher Education (‘Slow Train Coming’: https://edims.network/report/slowtraincoming/). She serves as peer reviewer for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Cambridge University Press amongst others, she is asked to act as an external doctoral examiner, supervisor, and consultant in the UK and internationally, and she is invited to give colloquia, lectures, and workshops at venues such as the Southbank Centre, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Wigmore Hall, Princeton University, Utrecht Early Music Festival, and the Royal College of Art.
Amy also holds the post of Lecturer in Music Performance at King’s College London, and is a Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music. She has previously held positions lecturing at the Royal College of Music and as Impact Fellow at the University of Cambridge (as co-author of the impact report for the AHRC Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP).
Amy lectures in subjects involving recording processes, live versus recorded performance practices, ethnographic methods for studying classical music-making, innovative performer-led concert practices, and using recordings as evidence of past performance style. She runs performance workshops from undergraduate to doctoral level, and in addition to creating these types of modules, she has also authored a Professional Diploma in Collaborative Recording Production.
Research output: Book › Authored Book
Research output: Book › Chapter in Book › peer-review
Research output: Research Report › Research Report for External Body › peer-review
Research output: Book › Chapter in Book › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review