I am pleased to say that after 6 months of furlough we are back and ready to continue our work. Since we started our project in September 2019 we have been able to build a wonderful team of researchers. We started a focus group for performances with Royal College of Music (RCM) students and professionals, made headway with several music editions, undertook extensive archival research at Senate House Library and Glyndebourne archive, and we were just about to start a first series of concerts when Covid-19 brought us to a halt in the spring. We now have to adjust and come to terms with the reality that restrictions are likely to continue for quite a while. We have been given some extra funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to help with the effect of Covid-19 on the project. This will, amongst other things, enable us to film and live-stream performances and events. Over this summer, the Insiders/Outsides Festival invited us to participate in some online events for Refugee Week which were a great success. Practitioner research with the project’s focus group will resume with socially distanced rehearsals and concerts, and we hope to recruit new members among the new arrivals at the RCM. Since we cannot have any live audiences at present we are planning to invite interested individuals to join us for free workshop performances via video stream and contribute to the research by filling in an online questionnaire. Please contact us if you would like to take part! Archival research and work on the project’s case studies (Anglo-Austrian Music Society and Glyndebourne) are continuing. We are also planning further oral history interviews. Our first major concert will take place in the brand-new Performance Hall at the RCM on November 11. It is titled 'Matyas Seiber, Traveller between Worlds’. The concert will be filmed and broadcast (after the concert) as part of the RCM’s event series. On December 3 (10am - 4pm), the project’s first symposium is scheduled to go ahead at the Austrian Cultural Forum. It will include presentations from all members of the team as well as a number of distinguished guests. We are planning to stream the event live for registered participants. Please save the date, we hope you will be able to join us. A schedule will be posted here in due course. I am also pleased to report that a group of Masters students taught by Prof. Carolin Stahrenberg at the Bruckner Universität Linz will join the practitioner research this autumn. The students will develop lecture recital programmes highlighting migration and mobility, and we hope to connect them virtually with our focus group at the RCM. We will also continue our editing work for RCM Editions. Projects include the revue ‘What a Life’ by Hans Gál, songs by Eric Sanders and Karl Rankl as well as excerpts from the ‘Tagebuch in Tönen’ by Robert Kahn.
