Research Seminar Series - PGR Presentations

Room KCT 4 King's College or Microsoft Teams

Join us to hear about the research being undertaken by three of our PGR candidates. 

Coralie Usmani

Spurred by never quite being able to fit the tick-box requirements of ethnicity forms, violinist Coralie Usmani considers the multiple place-based heritages that she holds (New Zealand, Singapore, England, Scotland, Indonesia, China) by making music to represent these heritages. 

She shares how attempting to synthesise this multiplicity through her music-making has necessitated engagement with narratives such as decolonialism, cultural appropriation, identity politics, authenticity and so on. In this talk, Coralie will speak about the influence this has on her artistic direction, and share two contrasting musical examples from her practice that respond to her family heritage in some way. 

The first is a free improvisation based on the musical themes associated with three intersecting streets (Jalan Terang Bulan, Swan Lake Ave, and Dido St) located on Singapore’s Opera Estate. She shares how the musical decisions in the improvisation were influenced by her research into the song ‘Terang Bulan’ - a Malay Bangsawan favourite and cabaret hit that was popular in 1920s/30s Singapore. The second is a slip-jig (ish) called Bon Accord Harbour and draws its influence from an Aberdeen-New Zealand connection in the colonial era. In listening to these examples, and considering their framing, an openness to question one's own listening positionality on themes of heritage is invited. 

Coralie Usmani studied classical performance violin at Auckland University (BMus Hons) and holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Music Psychology from the University of Sheffield. In NZ she performed with the Auckland Philharmonia among others, and in the UK she worked for Sistema Scotland and as CEO of Jazz Scotland. She is currently researching toward a PhD in music composition at the University of Aberdeen supported by the Margaret Carlaw Scholarship. Her compositions utilise models that are conducive to improvisatory and social music-making – e.g. tune-writing, contrafact composition and free-jazz approaches – so as to allow space to develop a personal sound on the violin. She presents these in live performance under her middle name Ming Hui. 

Kris Rasmussen

Empathy machines and autobiographical stimuli as method for contemporary composition. This presentation outlines Kristain’s current research path and what has led him onto empathy machines, next Kristain will discuss how these empathy machines work in practice, by discussing his string quartet 2 in 1. This string quartet deals with dementia, emotional responses to a loved one’s illness and the disintegration of memory, discussing specific methodology of research, practice and use of empathy machines within 2 in1. 

Kris Rasmussen is an Aberdeen based composer. He is the current music director for Spectrum Ensemble, and he is the cofounder and director of the new Ensemble Haar, alongside Lliam Paterson. He has also been the director for the department’s Composers’ Day for 2025 and 2026. He has represented Scotland as part of a team of delegates for Nordic festivals and has had his music premiered across Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands and soon to be New York. 

Will Sims

Following almost 200 years of minimal significant compositional output and development since Henry Purcell (d. 1695) in comparison to the European baroque, classical, and romantic eras, leading Oscar A. H. Schmitz to notoriously describe Britain as “Das Land Ohne Musik” (‘the land without music’ – a moniker generally believed by both nations), the English Musical Renaissance marked a new style of composition, coupled with intense output (in particular, in sacred music and art song), from the mid-19th to late 20th-centuries. Curated in the teachings of the Royal College of Music, this movement was driven by Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, to the era’s most iconic figures – including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi, and Herbert Howells – and arguably concluding with Kenneth Leighton and Michael Tippett. 

From the 1970’s, British sacred music has splintered (similarly to European music in the early 20^th -century), with two particular camps at the forefront: what can be loosely termed as ‘contemporary classical music’ as eschewed by the New Music Manchester collective, broadly focusing on New Complexity, New Simplicity, and experimental music; and ‘holy minimalism’: developed in the UK in particular by John Tavener, where melody, harmony, and structure are broken down to their simplest forms, and in the 21st-century a focus on reaching a particular chord, rather than overarching shape. This talk will explore the developments in English Sacred Music of the EMR from both the British Tudor era and music of its European contemporaries, and through the lens of composition – focusing on my recent carol-anthem The Christmas Rose and motet Watch, O Lord – explore how contemporary composers can write music expanding more directly from the end of the tradition. 

Will Sims is the Director of Chapel Music at Robinson College, Cambridge, where he conducts the Choir and supervises undergraduates in the Faculty of Music. In this role, he has directed the Choir’s first three commercial recordings, performed in the Thomaskirche, Sagrada Família, and Duomo di Milano, and given over fifteen world premierés. He is a prize-winning Choral Director of the Royal College of Organists and was an inaugural member of the Yale Sacred Music Academy. Will has sung in the Cathedral Choirs of Ely, Edinburgh, Lincoln, and Peterborough, and has recorded for Delphian Records and broadcast across BBC Radio and Television. He has accompanied recitals of Art Song around the UK, including in the Edinburgh and Cambridge Festivals, and will make his first recordings of Howells, Downes, and Milford in 2026. His compositions have been performed across Europe and regularly premiered in The London Festival of Contemporary Church Music.