Interdisciplinary approaches to functional electronic and biological materials

INTELBIOMAT/ICAM/I2CAM Meeting A European programme of workshops, schools, and exchange visits is targeted at the understanding, modelling and design of functional materials. Materials functionality is often based on phenomena that are poorly understood at a predictive level either because of inherently strong interactions (e.g. magnetism, ferroelectricity, superconductivity) or complex structure (e.g. composites, oxides, biomaterials), and increasingly both. Our proposal brings together different communities: materials scientists, experimentalists, and theorists. Together with an established (and US National Science Foundation - funded) programme, our European network will acquire an international dimension across North America and Asia. INTELBIOMAT/ICAM/I2CAM meeting to be held in Cambridge, UK, January 2009 The next INTELBIOMAT meeting will take place January 10th - 14th, 2009 and will be jointly held with the institute for complex adaptive matter (ICAM/I2CAM). It will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of ICAM and will be the first meeting of ICAM in Europe. This gathering will take place at the Moller Centre situated in West Cambridge near Churchill College. For a map follow this link. All meals and accommodation (en-suite double rooms) are provided on-site at the Moller centre. There will be regular tea and coffee breaks during the day and Wi-Fi internet access is widely available. Conference fees are as follows. Read more...

Oxford University Press (OUP) is the largest university press in the world, and the second oldest after Cambridge University Press. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the vice-chancellor known as the delegates of the press. They are headed by the secretary to the delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University has used a similar system to oversee OUP since the 17th century. The Press is located on Walton Street, opposite Somerville College, in the suburb Jericho.
The Oxford University Press Museum is located on Great Clarendon Street, Oxford. Visits must be booked in advance and are led by a member of the archive staff. Displays include a 19th-century printing press, the OUP buildings, and the printing and history of the Oxford Almanack, Alice in Wonderland and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Establishment of Music Department

Prior to the twentieth century, the Press at Oxford had occasionally printed a piece of music or a book relating to musicology. It had also published The Yattendon Hymnal in 1899 and, more significantly, the first edition of The English Hymnal in 1906, under the editorship of Percy Dearmer and the then largely unknown Ralph Vaughan Williams. Sir William Henry Hadow's multi-volume Oxford History of Music had appeared between 1901 and 1905. Such musical publishing enterprises, however, were rare: "In nineteenth-century Oxford the idea that music might in any sense be educational would not have been entertained", and few of the Delegates or former Publishers were themselves musical or had extensive music backgrounds.

In the London office, however, Milford had musical taste, and had connections particularly with the world of church and cathedral musicians. In 1921, Milford hired Hubert J. Foss, originally as an assistant to Educational Manager V. H. Collins. In that work, Foss showed energy and imagination. However, as Sutcliffe says, Foss, a modest composer and gifted pianist, "was not particularly interested in education; he was passionately interested in music." When shortly thereafter Foss brought to Milford a scheme for publishing a group of essays by well-known musicians on composers whose works were frequently played on the radio, Milford may have thought of it as less music-related than education-related. There is no clear record of the thought process whereby the Press would enter into the publishing of music for performance. Foss's presence, and his knowledge, ability, enthusiasm, and imagination may well have been the catalyst bringing hitherto unconnected activities together in Milford's mind, as another new venture similar to the establishment of the overseas branches.

Milford may not have fully understood what he was undertaking. A fiftieth anniversary pamphlet published by the Music Department in 1973 says that OUP had "no knowledge of the music trade, no representative to sell to music shops, andґit seems-no awareness that sheet music was in any way a different commodity from books." However intentionally or intuitively, Milford took three steps that launched OUP on a major operation. He bought the Anglo-French Music Company and all its facilities, connections, and resources. He hired Norman Peterkin, a moderately well-known musician, as full-time sales manager for music. And in 1923 he established as a separate division the Music Department, with its own offices in Amen House and with Foss as first Musical Editor. Then, other than general support, Milford left Foss largely to his own devices.

Foss responded with incredible energy. He worked to establish "the largest possible list in the shortest possible time", adding titles at the rate of over 200 a year; eight years later there were 1750 titles in the catalogue. In the year of the department's establishment, Foss began a series of inexpensive but well edited and printed choral pieces under the series title "Oxford Choral Songs". This series, under the general editorship of W. G. Whittaker, was OUP's first commitment to the publishing of music for performance, rather than in book form or for study. The series plan was expanded by adding the similarly inexpensive but high-quality "Oxford Church Music" and "Tudor Church Music" (taken over from the Carnegie UK Trust); all these series continue today. The scheme of contributed essays Foss had originally brought to Milford appeared in 1927 as the Heritage of Music (two more volumes would appear over the next thirty years). Percy Scholes's Listener's Guide to Music (originally published in 1919) was similarly brought into the new department as the first of a series of books on music appreciation for the listening public. Scholes's continuing work for OUP, designed to match the growth of broadcast and recorded music, plus his other work in journalistic music criticism, would be later comprehensively organized and summarized in the Oxford Companion to Music.

Perhaps most importantly, Foss seemed to have a knack for finding new composers of what he regarded as distinctively English music, which had broad appeal to the public. This concentration provided OUP two mutually reinforcing benefits: a niche in music publishing unoccupied by potential competitors, and a branch of music performance and composition that the English themselves had largely neglected. Hinnells proposes that the early Music Department's "mixture of scholarship and cultural nationalism" in an area of music with largely unknown commercial prospects was driven by its sense of cultural philanthropy (given the Press's academic background) and a desire to promote "national music outside the German mainstream."

In consequence, Foss actively promoted the performance and sought publication of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Constant Lambert, Alan Rawsthorne, Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine), Edmund Rubbra and other English composers. In what the Press called "the most durable gentleman's agreement in the history of modern music," Foss guaranteed the publication of any music that Vaughan Williams would care to offer them. In addition, Foss worked to secure OUP's rights not only to music publication and live performance, but the "mechanical" rights to recording and broadcast. It was not at all clear at the time how significant these would become. Indeed, Foss, OUP, and a number of composers at first declined to join or support the Performing Right Society, fearing that its fees would discourage performance in the new media. Later years would show that, to the contrary, these forms of music would prove more lucrative than the traditional venues of music publishing.

Whatever the Music Department's growth in quantity, breadth of musical offering, and reputation amongst both musicians and the general public, the whole question of financial return came to a head in the 1930s. Milford as London publisher had fully supported the Music Department during its years of formation and growth. However, he came under increasing pressure from the Delegates in Oxford concerning the continued flow of expenditures from what seemed to them an unprofitable venture. In their mind, the operations at Amen House were supposed to be both academically respectable and financially remunerative. The London office "existed to make money for the Clarendon Press to spend on the promotion of learning." Further, OUP treated its book publications as short-term projects: any books that did not sell within a few years of publication were written off (to show as unplanned or hidden income if in fact they sold thereafter). In contrast, the Music Department's emphasis on music for performance was comparatively long-term and continuing, particularly as income from recurring broadcasts or recordings came in, and as it continued to build its relationships with new and upcoming musicians. The Delegates were not comfortable with Foss's viewpoint: "I still think this word 'loss' is a misnomer: is it not really capital invested?" wrote Foss to Milford in 1934.

Thus it was not until 1939 that the Music Department showed its first profitable year. By then, the economic pressures of the Depression as well as the in-house pressure to reduce expenditures, and possibly the academic background of the parent body in Oxford, combined to make OUP's primary musical business that of publishing works intended for formal musical education and for music appreciationґagain the influence of broadcast and recording. This matched well with an increased demand for materials to support music education in British schools, a result of governmental reforms of education during the 1930s. The Press did not cease to search out and publish new musicians and their music, but the tenor of the business had changed. Foss, suffering personal health problems, chafing under economic constraints plus (as the war years drew on) shortages in paper, and disliking intensely the move of all the London operations to Oxford to avoid The Blitz, resigned his position in 1941, to be succeeded by Peterkin.