Practice research prize citations:

The Committee received 17 nominations for the Practice Research Prize for 2023. Alongside recognising excellence, a goal of this award is to create a body of diverse examples of high-quality practice research that builds year on year. In light of this, and also as this is the first year of the prize, the eligibility was extended to research outputs from the last five years (as opposed to only from the last 12 months). The panel were impressed with the range and achievement of the submissions, and have awarded a joint prize, to Mine Doğantan-Dack and Edmund Hunt respectively, as well as noting three commendations (Lauren Redhead, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, and Oliver Rudland).

Mine Doğantan-Dack was awarded for her article ‘Senses and Sensibility: The Performer’s Intentions Between the Page and the Stage’ in Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale (volume 27, number 1). The drew on the processes involved in forming a performance interpretation and the lived experience of her performance of selected pieces from the western art music repertoire under a phenomenological microscope. The article engages with discourses and differences across artistic research and performance studies, and discuss the deeply situated embodied-affective, sensuous and multimodal knowledge, insights, judgments and skills that a performer brings to the creative space between ‘the page’ and ‘the stage’.

Edmund Hunt was awarded for his exposition ‘Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music’ on researchcatalogue.net. His work builds on the rich and ongoing body of work on ambiguity of the voice in electroacoustic music, but through composition with untranslated, early medieval poetry and its ‘electroacoustic vocality’. Hunt’s exposition provides a clear context (across theory and practice) for the insights developed through his compositional work, as well as detailed exemplars and discussion of the works themselves.

Additionally, the panel highly commend the following submissions: Lauren Redhead’s The Octopus, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s Flucoma project, and Oliver Rudland’s multi-component output Long Hours at the Coalface and ‘Co-creating a Brass Band Dance Number’.