Music in Historical Cultures
Department of Music research theme
We study the ways in which music has played a role in society from the medieval period to the late twentieth century. Our work is historical, analytical and critical, and also practical: we are committed to bringing the music of the past back to life through research-informed performance.
We bring together performers and scholars in four areas of special focus:
- Early Music and Performance, concentrating on the late medieval and early Baroque periods;
- Musical Analysis and Criticism, featuring philosophically informed close reading of musical texts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries;
- British Music Studies, with a particular emphasis on the period 1860–1960; and
- Music and Politics in the Twentieth Century, centred on the relationship of music and fascism in Germany and Italy.
Our people
- Nicholas Attfield works on German and Austrian music and culture from c. 1870 to c. 1945.
- Amy Brosius works on social and musical analysis of early modern Italian singing culture.
- Ben Curry works on philosophical approaches to musical meaning and music analysis, usually with a focus upon late eighteenth-century classical music or African American music.
- Ben Earle works on the history, analysis and aesthetics of twentieth-century music, especially Italian and British.
- Andrew Kirkman is a scholar-performer working on late-medieval music and recording on the Hyperion label with the Binchois Consort.
- Ceri Owen works on the history of twentieth-century British music, especially British song and song performance.
- Matthew Riley works on the analysis and interpretation of music in historical contexts, especially classical instrumental music and British music c. 1880–1945
- Paul Rodmell works on the musical culture of the British Isles in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, with particular interests in opera and church music.
Projects
Key publications
- Nicholas Attfield, Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–1933 (Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2017).
- Amy Brosius, ‘Courtesan Singers as Courtiers: Power, Political Pawns, and the Arrest of virtuosa Nina Barcarola’, Journal of the American Musicological Society (forthcoming).
- Ben Curry, ‘Valency – Actuality – Meaning: A Peircean Semiotic Approach to Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 142/2 (2017), pp. 401–43.
- Ben Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- Andrew Kirkman, The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- Ceri Owen, ‘On Singing and Listening in Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs’, 19th-Century Music, 40/3 (2017), pp. 257–82
- Matthew Riley, The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Paul Rodmell, Opera in the British Isles 1875–1918 (Ashgate, 2013).