Toby Martin

Cross-cultural collaboration in popular music represents opportunities for the audibility of multiple voices and the creation of new sounds, but it also presents many challenges. These challenges are both musical – that is, how to technically match voices – and ethical – that is, how to negotiate historically entrenched power discrepancies. Practice-based research has recently developed as a field in popular music studies. This burgeoning area has much to offer in terms of new knowledge, based on embodied insights, lived experience, and an arts practice. Through a practitioner-centred account of three projects involving traditional Persian and Vietnamese musicians, and western folk/rock musicians, this Element suggests pragmatic strategies and conceptual frameworks for making pop music with people of different cultural backgrounds.

Cross-cultural collaboration in popular music represents opportunities for the audibility of multiple voices and the creation of new sounds, but it also presents many challenges. These challenges are both musical – that is, how to technically match voices – and ethical – that is, how to negotiate historically entrenched power discrepancies. Practice-based research has recently developed as a field in popular music studies. This burgeoning area has much to offer in terms of new knowledge, based on embodied insights, lived experience, and an arts practice. Through a practitioner-centred account of three projects involving traditional Persian and Vietnamese musicians, and western folk/rock musicians, this Element suggests pragmatic strategies and conceptual frameworks for making pop music with people of different cultural backgrounds.

Excavation by Oxford Archaeology for the A21 Tonbridge to Pembury Dualling Scheme in Kent uncovered the well-preserved remains of a 19th-century rural estate brickworks, very few examples of which still survive. The Castle Hill Brickworks was established by 1833 within the grounds of the Somerhill Estate, and continued to produce bricks, tiles and drains for the estate and the local area until the 1930s. The excavated remains included three kilns, six drying sheds, a workshop and two pugmills, together with a cottage, office, clay pits and ponds, and provide the most complete picture of a rural brickworks that has been published from anywhere in the south-east of England. Construction of the road necessitated the removal of Burgess Hill Farm, one of the post-medieval farms attached to the estate. Following the dismantling of the listed barn and stables for re-erection at the Weald and Downland Living Museum and the recording and demolition of the farmhouse and other buildings, trenches were excavated to characterise the below-ground remains and corroborate the buildingsequence. Both the brickworks and the farm were situated alongside the Tonbridge to Hastings road (later the A21), and between them a turnpike milepost was found in situ, and the remains of the 17th/18th-century road were preserved at a passing place on the slope up to Castle Hill, where timber for the brickworks was grown.