
Dr Margaret McAllister,
IASH Nominated Fellow, July-August 2023, School for Celtic and Scottish Studies.
IASH Fellow/Fulbright Scotland, Visiting Professor, University of Edinburgh, January-August 2020, School for Celtic and Scottish Studies.
Home Institution: Berklee College of Music
Since 2007 I am Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Berklee College of Music, Boston. I compose for many different genres including orchestral works, choral music, string quartet, works for electroacoustic media, solo works, film, a variety of chamber ensembles and music for performance by children. I have received fellowships and residencies from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Festival at Sandpoint, Scotia Festival of Music, Centres Acanthes, Avignon and others. I have alsoreceived commissions and performances from many solo artists and performing ensembles.I would characterize my music as an individualistic form of polystylism that embraces both the experimental and the lyrical as is necessary for specific discourse and expression.
Research Interests:
- The political and sociological impact of musical rhetoric and discourse, with a special focus on language and text settings.
- The sonic and rhythmic properties of languages is a primary interest, and I have composed text settings in Spanish, German, Portuguese, English and Scottish Gaelic.
- Multi-disciplinary collaborative processes between artists and technologists and the intrinsic integration of auditory and visual parameters in multimedia artworks.
- The history and pedagogy of music theory both western and non-western and their relationship to language is linked to my work as both an educator and a creator.
Project: Music, Words and Meaning: An Exploration in Synergistic Composition
Historically, composers of classical music in the Western art music tradition, have absorbed, harvested and/or transformed musical ideas from past and present, from disparate styles and genres, to inspire musical expressions, and as pathways to strike their musical imagination into form. In like manner, the role of words generated by forms such as: poetry, prose, sacred texts and dramatic narratives, are inextricably inter-twined with the history of human musical expression. While listening to music without words, so called “absolute music,” we sense meaning and collective experience to be there, but it cannot be rationally defined since the music consists of purely sonic events. When the music includes the setting of a text, the imagination of the listener is directed toward more tangible meanings. Composers, when setting text, work in unique ways with the various elements in the architecture of the formal structures, and sonic vocabulary of the text they have chosen. The variables involved in setting words to music are truly vast. My Fulbright project in 2020 was to collaborate synergistically with Scottish poet Aonghas MacNeacail in creating a work for chorus and orchestra. Aonghas passed away on 20 December 2022 and I am now working from our notes and poetry that we chose and modified together. This summer at IASH I have written the chamber music version for five singers and piano. I called the piece Mac-Talla/ Echo – after a Gaelic newspaper published in Nova Scotia that we researched together. It was performed 15 and 19 August 2023 at the Scottish Arts Club as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.