Falmouth professor wins UK’s most coveted music prize

University College Falmouth's Associate Professor of Music and Sound Art, Dr David Prior, and co-collaborator and architect, Frances Crow, were announced the winners of the Performing Right Society Foundation (PRSF) New Music Award last night at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

The PRSF New Music Award offers prize money of £50,000 and is therefore of greater financial significance than the Mercury and Turner prizes. It is one of the most ambitious and experimental music competitions in the UK, and is highly coveted.

The winning idea, The Organ of Corti, will now be developed and realised by the end of 2011.

Visually reminiscent of a fairground organ and taking its name from the organ of hearing in the inner ear, The Organ of Corti is a mobile structure that filters the noise of its current surroundings to create subtle shifting harmonies depending on the source of the external sounds and the position of the listener in relation to the Organ of Corti itself.  By carefully designing the Organ of Corti according to the sound character of the site in which it is intended to be placed, locations visited by the Organ of Corti can have a piece of music specifically composed for them.

The Organ of Corti will recycle unwanted sound in the environment to create an unfolding musical composition.  In a world saturated with sounds, the Organ of Corti questions whether we need any more noise and instead offers a new frame through which to listen to the sounds that already surround us.  Both the origins of the sound and the method of listening are challenged.

David and Frances worked collaboratively with funding from the Wellcome Trust, under the name of Liminal, to explore the relationship between sound, health, wellbeing and the environment.  Their research group included two acousticians, a computational neuroscientist and a clinical audiologist.  During this research, they came across the technology of sonic crystals and from this arose their proposal for The Organ of Corti.

Chief arts editor for the Guardian newspaper, Charlotte Higgins, chaired an esteemed panel of  judges that consisted of: artist, Martin Creed; composer and pianist, Michael Finnissy; pianist, Joanna MacGregor; singer/songwriter, Bishi and music journalist and critic, Paul Morley with one vote held by the public majority.

According to Charlotte's blog: "The judges were impressed by the quiet purity of the idea; an idea that does not add sound to the (already noise-saturated) environment, but reuses what is already there." Their decision was unanimous.

The New Music Award was launched five years ago by the PRS for Music Foundation and aims to promote and stimulate a universally accepted and motivated culture of musical innovation.

The premiere of The Organ of Corti will take place during  the 2011 City of London Festival. Three further performances will take place as The Organ of Corti travels to the M6 motorway and the Tebay Gorge in the Lake District; the edge of the A419 to the Cotswold Water Park, Wiltshire and finally, next to Diglis Weir in Worcester.

Previous winners of this prestigious prize include former Pogue, Jem Finer, in 2005 for Score for a Hole in the Ground.

The UK Government recently awarded additional full-time degree places to University College Falmouth so there are even more opportunities to study on UCF's range of Art, Design, Media and Performance courses from this autumn. These courses prepare students for an inspiring future within the creative industries - now firmly acknowledged as one of the fastest growing sectors in the UK economy.

The award of these additional degree places continues the extensive funding for growth that UCF is experiencing. Recent investments include world-class facilities such as the impressive £19M Performance Centre launching this autumn at the Tremough Campus. The Performance Centre will house our Dance, Music and Theatre degree courses, moving to Cornwall this year following UCF's merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

Liminal: David Prior & Frances Crow

Liminal is a collaborative studio established by David Prior and Frances Crow  to explore the relationship between sound and the environment. Liminal's recent work includes site- specific soundwalks, gallery installations and contributions to masterplanning projects in Birmingham and the Cotswold Water Park.

http://www.liminal.org.uk/

PRSF New Music Award

www.prsformusicfoundation.com/newmusicaward/2010shortlist.htm

PRS Foundation for New Music (PRSF)

The PRS for Music Foundation for New Music (PRSF) is the UK's largest independent funder of new music across all genres.  Widely respected as an adventurous and proactive funding body, PRSF supports an exceptional range of new music activity -from unsigned band showcases to composer residencies, from commissions for new music to experimental live electronica.

Since March 2000, PRSF has given more than £12 million to over 3,000 new music initiatives. In addition to stimulating and supporting the creation and performance of new music, it motivates public debate about creative music-making through ground-breaking projects such as the New Music Award.  For more information about the PRS for Music Foundation and the New Music Award, please visit http://www.prsformusicfoundation.com/

For further information about Music courses at University College Falmouth, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/music, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 255944.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the right to award degrees in its own name.  UCF has two campuses - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns and jointly manages with the University of Exeter).

UCF's merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008 created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Dance, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing.  The Dartington-based courses are relocating to Cornwall this summer to a high-specification £19M Performance Centre at the Tremough Campus that will launch in September 2010, paving the way for the creation of a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2013/2014 that will be unique to the South West.

The Performance Centre was a £19,036,000 project.  The European Union's Regional Development Funds provided £12,266,667 to support the development with a further £3 million coming from the South West Regional Development Agency's Single Pot. The remaining investment funding came from the Higher Education Funding Council for England's Strategic Development Fund.

UCF is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One and Convergence), the South West Regional Development Agency and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

Ends

For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby Dip CIPR MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email: jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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