Opportunity: Composer PhD Studentship

You can decide for yourselves if four years ’embedded’ in Stan’s Cafe is something you’d wish on your best friend or gravest enemy, either way, if that person is a composer craving a PhD you’d do well to introduce them to this very unusual opportunity…

The Royal Birmingham Conservertoire and Stan’s Cafe are looking for an inquisitive and talented composer with exciting ideas and a passion for collaboration, to spend four years exploring the question:

“How can a composer-in-residence add value to Stan’s Cafe?”

Stan’s Cafe regularly collaborates with composers who write and create music for our shows. We also occasionally engage composers to work on our Creative Learning Programme in schools. This opportunity isn’t about doing these composers out of work, instead it is about seeking out where else a composer-in-residence could improve the company: how it thinks, how it operates, the work it makes and its broader working culture – who knows? That’s for the inquisitive, talented composer with exciting ideas and a passion for collaboration to find out.

This question is to be answered through practice-based explorations all made in the context of a literature review and survey of the field of contemporary practice in artist residencies. They will spend up to 48 months embedded in Stan’s Cafe and at the successful conclusion of their research they will be a (non-medical) Doctor.

Thanks to an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, channelled through Midlands4Cities, this PhD has its tuition fees paid, there is a maintainance grant of £15K and even the opportunity for additional research costs to paid for.

The PhD will be supervised by Dr. Michael Wolters, Deputy Head of Composition, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with James Yarker, Artistic Director, Stan’s Cafe
and Professor Joe Cutler, Head of Composition, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

Expressions of interest must submitted by December 2020
Selection is in February 2021
Studies run: September 2021 – September 2025

A more detailed and rigorous description of the course of research can be found here.
A more definitive description of the opportunity and support available can be found here.
You can read about Stan’s Cafe’s relationship with music and composers here.

The best thing to do if you think you may be interested is to contact Michael, his email address is at the bottom of the full project description page.

Sounds like it could sound good.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *