Voiceworks Digital Song/Text Project: a collaboration between Birkbeck Centre for Poetics, Wigmore Hall & Guildhall School of Music & Drama

The Voiceworks song programme is a collaborative exchange between the internationally recognised Centre for Poetics at Birkbeck College, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the major venue for the performance of song in Britain, Wigmore Hall. New songs are developed through a series of workshops and exchanges between young composers, poets and singers, which are then performed live at the Wigmore each year.

The aim of this project is to develop a digital platform - an interactive website - that will not only make these sound and visual files available, but also document the process of collaboration and materials which poets, composers and singers use to think about the crossings between their different traditions, including the way in which languages of poetry, music and sound can be thought in new digital environments. In addition to the focus on Voiceworks, which will include a blog for those participating in the programme and a live streaming of the Voiceworks performances at Wigmore Hall on the internet, the website will generate an archive of materials available to researchers and those interested in the wider interactions of text, music and song over the last century and beyond, a resource that can be added to as new work emerges. Those active on the project will also film and record with permission a range of contemporary work currently taking place in London - from live poetry, to sound performances, to new work in opera and song - which can be made available on the site.

The developing of a website such as this is an opportunity to think about the digital archive and its emerging possibilities as a research question in its own right. Discussion of, and active participation in the making of, the digital Voiceworks project will be supported by talks and colloquia throughout the period of the grant, culminating in a public symposium at Wigmore Hall. The curating of the website over the period will involve the exploration of how innovative poetic and song composition can be brought to wider audiences and new generations, by using the technologies of a digital environment (flickr, youtube, itunes, vimeo) to inform its work. It will include poets and composers in residence on the site for agreed periods of time, the commissioning of particular work or exchanges, interviews, the development of new areas of the archive by invited participants. Its aim is to exploit the creative possibilities of the digital field for the field of song, music composition and poetics, in a unique collaboration which brings the traditions and cultural/creative assets of an institution such as Wigmore Hall, as well as proven innovative practice and research at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Birkbeck's Centre for Poetics, an internationally known forum for performance, publication and discussion of contemporary poetries, into new networks and potential.

This research will produce direct benefits for those engaged in research in, and practitioners working with, song, composition and text/poetry, who will be able to access new archives and also participate on the site. Centrally, because of the unique nature of this collaboration, the project has the potential to connect and enrich a number of often discrete networks and audiences. Wigmore Hall as a renowned public institution has over 3500 Friends currently subscribed, selling 156,357 tickets last year for its song repertoire, and its educational programme - which first generated the Voiceworks song project - takes place in more than 40 schools. Guildhall School as an exceptional conservatoire brings in public audiences for existing and new work in music. The Birkbeck Centre for Poetics is embedded in local, national and international networks of research, performance and writing in poetry, including many non-academic circuits and groups who participate in free Birkbeck readings, internet events and conferences. All these networks would be able to access the cultural assets possessed and generated by each institution, as well as the exchange across media and disciplines the collaboration is exploring which is moving far beyond what would be possible individually. The website would also be fully searchable to the general public online.
The distinctive impact of this digital development has considerable and unique benefits. It is important in rapidly transforming digital environments to open the wealth of what might be seen as traditional cultural forms - song, music, opera, poetry - and their audiences, to new generations of innovative work and methods of encounter, and new listeners and song writers and composers - in order that that repertoire can continue to renew itself in the twenty-first century. At the same time new creative practice becomes informed and enriched by those resources, which are mobile. Institutions and their cultural assets can be porous to new audiences and groups in generative ways because of new digital modes of dissemination and contact. This renewal and open access is a crucial part of the health of cultural life, and the innovative outputs of this project - which networks through groups which would otherwise remain separated - would also underline Britain's cutting edge in the exploration of the potential of digital culture.
Birkbeck, Wigmore and Guildhall School all have developed external relations networks available to communicate this project, including track records of using the media such as the use of podcasts, social networking sites and established users (including schools, friends and students networks). This project has been planned to draw on that experience, but also to use new methods (flickr, vimeo, twitter, itunes, live streaming) and the curating of micro-sites to involve wider audiences in its materials. The impact can be felt quite quickly, and the ongoing Voiceworks collaboration will keep it live so that the realisation of benefits can be built over time and taken further. The interactive nature of the site (including blogs, feedback pages, mobile recording of work beyond the immediate programme, possible collaborations, use of artists in residence) means that it aims to bring in users as participants, not only as consumers and researchers. The research is in part about the active _practice_ of making a creative digital environment for new generations of song/text work, and keeping it dynamic beyond the end of the award. It is founded on a collaboration four years in its developing, and the new skills it will initiate among the team and wider participants will inform their continuing practice in national and international cultural life within and beyond the academy - as composers, poets, teachers, writers, performers, singers, musicians, curators, arts entrepreneurs - which Voic