14/10/2026
VISITING SCHOLAR RESEARCH SEMINAR
We are looking forward to welcoming visiting scholar Prof. Martin Iddon (University of Leeds, UK) to the Department next week. Prof. Iddon is a composer and musicologist, and will be giving several sessions including a research seminar (full details below). All are welcome.
TIME/DATE: 2pm, Wednesday 21st October
VENUE: University of Malta, Msida Campus, Old Humanities Building, room 127
TITLE: Wyrd Sounds: High Buildings, Black Cars
ABSTRACT: If folk horror is concerned with an interloper—an outsider who encounters some other community which continues traditions which are profoundly alien, horrific for the most ‘civilised’, urbane offcomer—the urban wyrd insists that the alterity persists, if subcutaneously, burrowed away in the substratum of modern, ‘advanced’, technological cities. Though music—sound more generally—is arguably central to the urban wyrd (and, for that matter, to folk horror), it has largely played only an adjunct role, as a handmaiden to visual media, in scholarly examinations. Here, then, I seek to present a reading of musics concerned with, as I see it, a sort of urban wyrdness, including Bauhaus, John Cale, The Cure, Joy Division, Su***de, and the Sisters of Mercy.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY: Prof. Martin Iddon is a composer and musicologist. He studied at the Universities of Durham and Cambridge, and is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. His music is available on pneuma (2014), Sapindales (2021), Naiads (2022), all on the Another Timbre label, and Hesperides (2025), on NMC. His books, New Music at Darmstadt, John Cage and David Tudor, John Cage and Peter Yates, the Cambridge Companion to Serialism, and Hauntology, Nostalgia, and New Music are published by Cambridge University Press, while John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra (co-authored with Philip Thomas) is published by Oxford University Press.
(Images: Portrait of Martin Iddon; Preston Bus Station, Lancashire, UK)
