Ms Elizabeth Dobson

Biography

Elizabeth studied composition and performance at Bangor University completing an MA for Music, Film, Media and the Arts in 1998. She has since composed full sound tracks for two schools based film dramas, written for various dancers and worked with schools and city learning centres in both the West Midlands and Hampshire. Elizabeth has since composed two orchestral arrangements for the Japanese Punk band Electric Eel shock (performed live with the band), and has most recently been collaborating with The Lotus Eaters writing and recording string quartet arrangements for a new album.

Elizabeth’s interests in collaborative practice have grown whilst working in Higher Education over the last 10 years and is currently moving into the final third of her PhD (part-time) with the Open University. Under the supervision of Professor Dorothy Miell and Dr Karren Littleton, Elizabeth has been conducting research that focuses on the longitudinal trajectories of collaboration and creativity within particular student contexts. This micro-study is complimented by a project that she is collaborating on with colleagues from York St John and the University of Hull through a Palatine Development Award: www.palatine.ac.uk/development-awards/1542/

Elizabeth has worked for the University of Hull (Scarborough Campus), Leeds College of Music, Portsmouth University, and since 2007, the University of Huddersfield. In addition to teaching and scholarly activities she has co-written and validated two Music Technology degrees and worked as an external examiner for course validations. She also currently working as a collaborative provision link tutor for the School of Music Humanities and Media.

Research & Scholarship

I am currently working on the final third of a PhD concerned with interdisciplinary collaboration, joint creative working, socially situated learning in a particular academic context. This is characterised by situations where:

"studio based music composers collaborate with students working in different creative or performing arts, in an academic context where the work is assessed formally as part of a degree for at least a term, under creative circumstances where the shape or type of creative product itself is unknown; it grows from the joint working process rather than a shared repertoire (Jazz) or a score."

My research is motivated by two questions. Firstly, what are the factors that possibly afford and constrain collaboration and joint creativity where when music technology students work with students from very different disciplines? Secondly, could a closer examination of this activity over time reveal something of the relationships between collaborative method, group knowledge and the creative emergence of new work? Ultimately, I am interested to develop a better understanding of what is educationally valuable about interdisciplinary creative collaboration for studio based undergraduate composers.

Various empirical studies have explored the collaborative dynamics within creative performing arts, though often within the same discipline. Contemporary research into collaborative music making explores performance rehearsals, group music composition and improvisation such as Jazz performance, often examining the various factors that help to afford or constrain joint creative working within a same discipline group. This work has helped to make distinctions between different types, or forms of collaboration whilst also revealing the benefit of participant familiarity and also their shared knowledge when working jointly. Misunderstanding and disagreement is of course common in collaborative contexts however the relative benefits or constrains are variable and complex and so my work explores a the woven relationship between collaborative form, joint growth and creative output by looking closely at the collaborative process as it unfolds over time in the context outlined above.

Since this PhD is work in process and not yet published I prefer not to post it here however please do contact me if you would like to read a conference paper that discusses this in more academic (and referenced) detail.

Research Interests

• Collaboration and creativity in Higher Education music.
• Creativity: Music composition processes, situated creativity.
• Sociocultural Theory: Concerned for relationships with culture, tools, mediation and intersubjectivity.
• Anthropological, inductive, multimodal and longitudinal methodologies.
• Education Action Research

Research Outputs

Areas for Research Supervision

Elizabeth is happy to supervise students undertaking an MA by Research, and co-supervise PhD students interested in exploring collaborative practice from a theoretical point of view as part of a composition or performance portfolio. More specifically Elizabeth is interested in supervising work that:

• Explores socially situated creativity within new music (perhaps from a composer’s or performer’s perspective).
• Seeks to learn more about collaborative growth through long-term collaborative relationships between specific practitioners.

Elizabeth is co-supervising Heather Roche with Dr Philip Thomas. Heather is a bass/clarinettist who is examining the collaborative relationships between clarinettists and composers. Please see her webside for more detail: heatherroche.wordpress.com/research/