Dr Amy Blier-Carruthers

Biography

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).

Research Interests:

• recording and studio practices
• live versus recorded performance practices
• ethnographic methods for studying classical music
• collaborative and experimental working practices
• recordings as evidence of performance practice
• performance analysis

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.

Doctoral Supervision:

Amy is open to doctoral proposals for creative and innovative performance-centred research along the spectrum from musicology to artistic research, on topics including: live versus recording studio performance practices; ethnographic approaches to studying classical music-making; collaborative and experimental performance and working practices; and recordings as evidence of past performance practice. 

She supervises doctoral candidates working along the whole spectrum from musicology to practice-based research. She has supervised doctoral projects across the Royal College of Music, Royal Academy of Music, and King’s College London, on topics such as: exploring Baroque repertoire in piano performance, innovative recording studio practices, cultural contexts and practices of music-making and performance style, arts institution histories, educational models, and peer-learning models and cross-arts collaboration networks. Current students are working on choral conducting leadership styles, violin repertoire from the Enlightenment Spanish court, and the contemporary performance and pedagogy of  khayāl in the Gwalior gharānā.

Teaching:

She 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.

Selected Publications:

• (Forthcoming 2024) From Stage to Studio: Classical Performance versus Recording, monograph, (Routledge, New York & London).
• (Forthcoming) Co-authored chapter with Peter Sheppard Skaerved: ‘Recording as Co-production: Exploring Collaborative Approaches to Classical Music Recording’.
• Slow Train Coming? Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in UK Music HE, with Bull, Anna and Bhachu, Diljeet, (2022).
• ‘The Problem of Perfection in Classical Recording: The Performer’s Perspective’, Musical Quarterly, December 2020, (Oxford University Press). https://academic.oup.com/mq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/musqtl/gdaa008/6020483?guestAccessKey=07967f48-72e6-4f00-808c-2ccd3acca2a2
• ‘The Influence of Technology on Performance – Classical Perspectives’, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production, Zagorski-Thomas, Simon and Bourbon, Andrew (eds.), (Bloomsbury, London: 2020).
• Walking Cities: London, Joseph-Lester, Jaspar, King, Simon, Blier-Carruthers, Amy, and Bottazzi, Roberto (eds.), (2^nd ed. Routledge, New York: 2020 / 1^st ed. Camberwell Press, London: 2016): the result of a collaboration with the Royal College of Art.
• ‘The Travelling Mindset: A Method for Seeing Everything Anew’, in Walking Cities: London,
• Joseph-Lester, Jaspar, King, Simon, Blier-Carruthers, Amy, and Bottazzi, Roberto (eds.), (2^nd ed. Routledge, New York: 2020 / 1^st ed. Camberwell Press, London: 2016), 265-291: proposes a model for using ethnographic techniques for studying artistic practice.
• Blier-Carruthers, Amy; Kolkowski, Aleks; and Miller, Duncan, ‘The Art and Science of Acoustic Recording: Re-enacting Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s landmark 1913 recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’, in The Science Museum Group Journal, Issue 3: Communications, Spring 2015. http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/browse/issue-03/the-art-and-science-of-acoustic-recording/
• ‘The Studio Experience: Control and Collaboration’ (with Stephen Johns), in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Performance Science (Vienna, August 2013), pp. 693-98. ISBN978-2-9601378-0-4 (published conference paper) http://performancescience.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/isps2013_proceedings.pdf
• ‘From Perfection to Expression? Exploring Possibilities for Changing the Aesthetics and Processes of Recording Classical Music’. Tracking the Creative Process in Music, IRCAM, Paris, 2015, , published conference paper, online: http://medias.ircam.fr/x35d33a
• ‘How I Learned to stop worrying and Love the Studio: A Professional and Paradigmatic Approach to Preparing Musicians for Recording’, From Output to Impact, Orpheus Instituut, Ghent, 2014, published conference paper, online: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/155614/228658