Current students
Miss Maria Kouvarou
(email at maria.kouvarou@durham.ac.uk)
Biography
Ms. Maria Kouvarou graduated with a distinction from the Music Department of Ionian University (Corfu, Greece) in 2009 and enrolled in the Music Department of Durham University the same year to study for an MA by Research in Aesthetics of Popular Music under the supervision of Prof. Max Paddison. The title of her MA thesis is ‘'This is what Salvation must be Like after a While': Bob Dylan's Critical Utopia'.
Maria is now a PhD candidate in Durham University, working on an AHRC-funded project. Her current research is dealing with how the Afro-American musical idioms, as carried through rock'n'roll, were accepted, adopted, developed and finally became assimilated in the popular music scenes of five European countries (Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Greece).
She has been playing the piano since the age of six and she has had a broad theoretical education in music before she entered Ionian University to continue with her studies in Musicology. She has performed in several venues as a pianist playing works of, among others, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, etc. At the same time, Maria has always been fascinated by the spontaneity, freedom and immediacy gained from performing rock music. The first group she participated was formed after her initiation at the age of fifteen and managed to win the first prize at a school talent competition. After that she participated in numerous groups, both in Cyprus and in Corfu, either as a pianist or as a singer, and she had the opportunity to perform in various venues around Greece,
Her traditional music education and her fascination with the effects of popular music in combination with her experience as a performer in both genres created the basis for her main research interests.
Research Interests
- Aesthetics of popular music
- Sociology of music
- Music and identity
- Theories of the global, local, national and transnational
- Music and language
- Audiences