Modernist Aesthetics and Musicology
In musicology we are principally interested in the relationships between musical texts and their contexts, within a repertoire from the late nineteenth century to the present and foci on modernism in Central and Eastern Europe, British music, popular music, jazz and film music.
Analysis informs all the musicological work of the department, but the methods and aims of this work are diverse. The analytical methodologies of our musicologists are outlined below.
Professor Stephen Downes’s work on a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth-century music attempts a methodological synthesis of analysis of musical structure with hermeneutics, history and aesthetics. Through this synthesis the aim is to understand the structures and meanings of topics such as eroticism and decadence within the romantic and modernist style and aesthetic.
Dr Jeremy Barham's approach is also interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on theories of modelling (for example, the translation of philosophical constructs into musical process), intertextuality, and meaning and cultural signification (through critical methods or paradigms such as 'metaphor'). His work also engages theories of narrative and temporal forms (for example, image-sound relations), as well as aesthetics and the nature and structures of interdisciplinarity itself.
Professor Allan Moore's object-centred (as distinct from theory-centred) work on popular music treats analysis as the interrogation of a heard text. He is interested in analysis as means rather than end (as part of the process of interpretation), and in the operation of analysis at distinct levels (style, idiolect, performance).
Dr Christopher Mark’s approach is essentially pragmatic: analysis is employed as tool to serve studies of stylistic evolution and expressive meaning, and provides the means to understand compositional languages and decisions within individual works. This approach is currently being applied in major studies of the music of Benjamin Britten, Roger Smalley, and the topic of melancholy in twentieth-century English music.
Dr Tim Hughes’s work in popular music includes the analysis of repetition, timbre, form, and other important but under-explored elements of music.
Two broad areas can be identified within this research; modernist aesthetics, and popular music and film.
Modernist Aesthetics
The department’s research engages with modernism’s characteristic preoccupations, with the aesthetic categories of fragment, originality, desire and subjective identity, the sublime, and the melancholic. It is also focused 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 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 has written five monographs –two on Karol Szymanowski (1994, 2003), a study of music and eroticism (2006), a book on decadence in Central and Eastern European modernism (2010), and a study of Hans Werne Henze’s Tristan (2010). He is currently working on a book on Mahler’s influence for CUP, a collections of essays on the avant-garde, and a companion to the music of Szymanowski. He has supervised research students working on the Orpheus myth in early twentieth century music, the music of Ethel Smyth, Greek nationalism, and death scenes in Janácek and Puccini operas. Dr Downes's research has been supported by several grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy .
Dr Jeremy Barham is established as a world-leading Mahler scholar. 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 has supervised students researching in the fields of late 19th-century performance studies, the musicalization of fiction in Virginia Woolf, and Busoni’s transcriptions.
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.