People

PhD Students                                                                                                                   

Michael Byrne (University of Cambridge)

Having completed his undergraduate studies in South Africa, Michael trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London, graduating in 2007 with a DipRAM award in Musical Theatre. He furthered his postgraduate work at RADA and King's College London, leaving in 2010 with a Master's in Text and Performance Studies. It was during this period that Michael began performing at the Royal Opera House and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, joining a community of actors that would serve as the foundation for his doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, for which he has received one of the CMPCP studentships. Focused on the oral histories of supernumerary performers within classical and contemporary opera, theatre and dance, this research seeks to provide a historiographical framework through which 'memory texts' can be structured, curated and evaluated, integrating performance studies, musicology and the analysis of various productions from the Royal Opera House's established repertoire.

Myles Eastwood (University of Cambridge)

Myles graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2009 and returned there in 2010-11 as a student on the MPhil in Musicology course under the supervision of Nicholas Cook. For his MPhil thesis Myles interviewed producers and engineers who worked in the classical record industry during the golden era of stereo LPs. His doctoral work at Cambridge (from October 2011) is on record production in Britain during the 1960s, focusing on the extent to which studio practices can be understood as coherent creative enterprises in and of themselves. To pursue this research Myles received one of the AHRC-funded PhD studentships offered by CMPCP. Other interests include popular music studies. In his spare time, Myles does location recording and plays drums and guitar in several bands.

Mats Küssner (King's College London)

Mats studied undergraduate psychology at the universities of Würzburg and Amsterdam from 2005 to 2008 before graduating from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2009 with a Master's in Music, Mind and Brain. He went on to read music at postgraduate level and gained teaching experience at Goldsmiths before taking up a fully funded PhD position at King's College London in June 2010. Mats' work within CMPCP, and more specifically the 'Shaping music in performance' project, involves the investigation of performers' and listeners' visualisations of sound and music. His general interests are music cognition and music-induced emotions.