Modernist Aesthetics and Musicology
Modernism, understood as a broad range of aesthetic and technical features in 19th and early 20th-century music, is an area of research focus within the department. This research engages with the era's characteristic preoccupations, reflected in the aesthetic categories of fragment, originality, desire and subjective identity, the sublime, and the melancholic. It is also focussed on Modernist obsessions with the new, with conflicts of order and chaos, and subjective anxieties in an age of political upheaval, technological advance and cultural crisis. This research engages with and develops central methods in historical and critical musicology and music analysis. In many areas the research in the department also applies an interdisciplinary approach, drawing, for example, upon hermeneutics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and cultural theory.
Dr Stephen Downes is working on a monograph exploring musical constructions of creativity, inspiration and eroticism in aesthetic contexts from Romantic idealism to Modernist anxiety. He also researches into musical expressions of subjective identity in central/eastern europe , involving gender, nationalism and ethnicity, and has lectured and published on these issues in Poland . The primarily focus is on the music of Karol Szymanowski - his monograph, Szymanowski, Eroticism and the Voices of Mythology, was published in 2003 - and he has also published on Bartók. His interest in the issue of inspiration has recently turned to the compositional legacy of Gustav Mahler in major research papers on Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. He has also worked on aspects of musical surrealism in Weill and Poulenc. He has supervised research students working on the Orpheus myth in early twentieth century music (Alison Matthew), the music of Ethel Smyth (Jo Stapleton), and death in Janácek operas (Lynne Hodgson). Dr Downes's research has been supported by several grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy .
Dr Jeremy Barham is established as one of the leading young Mahler scholars. He has undertaken research-funded by the British Academy-in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Philadelphia, and the focus of his work lies in Mahler's engagement with culture: philosophies of Romanticism (Schopenhauer, Fechner, late idealism) and Modernism (Nietzsche, Adorno), ethnic identity and notions of the self in the early 20th century, and structures of meaning and interdisciplinarity (metaphor, and, most recently, 'cinematic' modes of construction in Mahler). Dr Barham has further research interests in narrative and temporality in music and film media, and issues of intertextuality and appropriation in film music. His publications include a chapter on Mahler's early compositions in OUP's The Mahler Companion (rev. edn, 2002), a volume of Mahler studies for Ashgate, Perspectives on Gustav Mahler (2005), CUP's Companion to Mahler, (2007), a chapter on The Shining’ in Terror Tracks. Music, Sound and Horror Cinema (Equinox Press, forthcoming 2008) and numerous reviews for Music & Letters. He is currently working on monographs on Mahler, culture and musical meaning, and on music, time and the moving image. He supervises students researching in the fields of late 19th-century performance studies (Maureen Bonello), and the musicalization of fiction in Virginia Woolf (Emilie Crapoulet).
Dr Christopher Mark's research into English music of the twentieth century includes work leading towards a major publication on melancholy. Within the aesthetics of the early twentieth century this engages with the pastoral, the idyllic, and nostalgia in the music of Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Warlock, and Bridge. Dr Mark's research has been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy.
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