Report by Tamara Batty (University of Birmingham)

Birmingham is a city with a lot to offer (more than most people realise!) and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is one of them. Despite the snowy weather, the Conservatoire was a warm and welcoming host to the Music students who gathered from across the globe for the 2026 BFE-RMA Research Students’ Conference. This three-day conference was jampacked with research paper presentations, performances, keynote lectures, professional development sessions, lecture recitals, workshops, poster sessions, and (believe it or not) more!

Upon arriving to the RBC, we were greeted by members of the conference committee, who handed out personalised lanyards and a conference pack with a booklet detailing the various events happening throughout the conference, a notebook, and information on places to eat, drink, and see whilst staying in Birmingham. Even though I consider myself a Brummie, the conference pack was a great idea, especially for scholars visiting from abroad who want to explore the city, but don’t know where to start.

Attendees gather for a photo op. Photo by Maria Payne.

The first day began with a training session on chairing panels for those who had volunteered to chair a panel or two throughout the conference. Hosted by conference co-chair Carrie Chunside, this session demystified the concept of chairing and equipped attendees with skills we could take beyond the BFE-RMA conference. It was also a great opportunity to meet fellow research students (and reconnect with those we had met at previous conferences!).

After a short welcome in the RBC’s prestigious Bradshaw Hall, we were let loose to attend the first sessions of the conference. It was a challenge to choose what to attend because there were so many interesting talks, presentations, and performance happening simultaneously. One of the sessions on offer was on festivals, İrem Nur Soycan presented her research on the festivalisation of the Kakava–Hıdırellez Celebrations in Edirne, with some great ethnographic footage setting the tone for the rest of the conference.

Later in the afternoon, the conference committee held two professional development sessions in the Bradshaw Hall. The first was a discussion on how to approach publishing as an early career Music researcher, led by Heidi Bishop, Music Editor at Routledge, and Michael Middeke, Music Editor at Boydell & Brewer. This session provided great advice on approaching publication and the different avenues that individuals may take to achieve this. The second professional development session was an EDI session focusing on disability and access. It facilitated some great conversations about how we can better consider accessibility in various facets of our research and working lives.

These were followed by another set of parallel sessions, including one on music and emotions. Edward Campbell-Rowntree presented ‘La Mort d’un Ami: Decrypting Grief in Early Modern French Tombeaux’, in which he explored how motifs and melodic patterns can allude to affects, he focused on grief, and how meanings of emotion change over time.

Attendees then migrated to the Bradshaw Hall for the first keynote of the conference: ‘For a Semi-Public Musicology (or, Hindemith in the Playground)’ by Jerome Roche Prize winner, Giles Masters. The keynote detailed a collaborative music-theatre project that Masters worked on for young people aged 8-10: Let’s Build a Town!, inspired by Paul Hindemith’s 1930 composition of the same name (Wir Bauen ein Stadt, in German). Reflecting on the success of this collaborative project, Masters proposed a semi-public musicology, influenced by Naomi André’s theorisation of an engaged musicology. It was great to see footage from the performance of Let’s Build a Town! as well as behind-the-scenes content giving us more insight into how the project developed. Masters did a stellar job of setting the bar for the keynote speeches at this conference (spoiler alert: don’t worry, none of the other keynote speakers disappointed!).

The day came to a close with a drinks reception outside Bradshaw Hall, allowing delegates to discuss the various presentations and performances they had attended during the first day of this exciting conference. Afterwards, influenced by the social recommendations found in our conference packs, some delegates visited a nearby local pub before BFE Conference Liaison Luigi Monteanni hosted a Black Sabbath tour to various iconic spots across the Birmingham city centre. After what had already been a 12-hour day, I commend those who managed to socialise through the night and still attend day two of the conference bright and early!

On the second day, we kicked off with some more parallel papers, presentations and workshops. I chaired the ‘Music, Spirituality and Christianity’ session, which, though looked at subjects outside of my own areas of study, demonstrated a great benefit of the BFE-RMA conference: we get to learn about other sub-disciplines and escape our own research bubbles! This was then followed by further parallel professional development sessions discussing important topics including careers in academia, careers outside academia, resilience, and PhD training in practice research.

After lunch and a poster session parallel paper sessions continued. The Music and Embodiment’ session featured insightful and engaging talks by Jingyi Bai and Matthew Peacock on affective cyborgs in popular music and the embodied practicalities of jazz, respectively.

The evening keynote, ‘Timothy Cooper in Conversation’, featured composer Timothy Cooper, recipient of the RMA’s Tippett Medal, speaking about his creative process, with particular reference to his piece Labyrinth. The discussion was facilitated by Edmund Hunt and Chris Cresswell. We were also lucky enough to witness a live performance of the piece, with Cooper on live electronics and Lucia Capellaro on baroque cello, which was an immersive experience suited to the venue of the Bradshaw Hall.

After another fulfilling day, the conference committee hosted informal evening performances so the delegates could enjoy some music and have a wind down. There were organ recitals by Godfrey Leung and Joseph Jacob in the Organ Studio, and a performance by the Indo-Jazz Ensemble in the Eastside Jazz Club, providing delegates with the opportunity to explore the RBC’s exceptional performance spaces.

The final day of the conference began with parallel sessions again. A thought-provoking session on power and representation featured Meg Rees’s paper on hearing race in cathedral choirs and Jack Williams’s presentation on the pandemic disco-diva through the lens of race and queerness. Both presenters, despite contrasting musical contexts, captured audience attention and helped initiate insightful conversation.

Later in the afternoon, Owen Coggins presented his remarkable keynote speech, ‘Distortion, Ambiguity, and Ideology in Underground Black Metal’. Coggins spoke about various black metal scenes and contexts over the past few decades and captivated the audience effectively, especially those who were unfamiliar with black metal, by clearly illustrating his arguments with musical examples, diagrams, and dry humour. (And Bradshaw Hall accommodated the screams and heavy distortion in the musical extracts very well!).

Owen Coggins delivers his Black Metal keynote. Photo by Luigi Monteanni.

The keynote was not the last session of the conference: there was one more set of parallel sessions before the close. The ‘Music & Materiality’ session included contributions from Holly Smith, who discussed medieval fragments as dynamic objects that tell stories of destruction and survival, and Luigi Monteanni, who looked at phono-material ecologies along the Sound-As-Physical-Assault continuum. It was a strong way to wrap up the conference.

This conference was a great start to the new year for Music researchers; we had the opportunity to attend papers, performances, and presentations on a variety of topics and in a range of sub-disciplines. There was an immense amount on offer, and the discussion above has necessarily focused on those parts of the conference I was able to attend myself (including sessions I chaired or at which I presented). I couldn’t possibly include everything, but I hope I have done the conference justice! I, and my fellow delegates, left the conference on the Thursday evening feeling fulfilled and inspired, having made new friends and connections that will propel us forward in our careers.