ABOUT ME
Before returning to Cambridge in 2015, I taught at the Universities of Bristol, King's College London, and Cambridge itself.
In my research and teaching, I approach music and its cultures in the widest interdisciplinary sense, incorporating perspectives of cultural and intellectual history, music theory and the history of science, and as well as mediality and the philosophy of technology.
My first book, Wagner's Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity (2013), examines the cultural and scientific history of melodic theory in relation to Wagner's writings and music; it received the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society, the Donald Tovey Memorial Prize of Oxford University, and was listed as one of several notable books published in 2013 on Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise.
My latest project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant, is entitled 'Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century.' This began in September 2015 and examines how a scientific-materialist conception of sound was formed alongside a dominant culture of romantic idealism. Three postdoctoral research fellows joined the project in September 2016.
Alongside this work, I am using a Philip Leverhulme Prize (mentioned on the AMS' blog) to support work on a monograph about music and virtuality. It views virtuality as the flipside of materialism, and examines the influence of cutting edge technologies on our relationship to music and sound within an environment, from HD simulcasts to prosthetic hearing.
More broadly, I recently discussed Wagner and Plato, beauty and morality for A History of Ideas on BBC Radio 4, and my publications include editions and translations, as well as research and review articles. I guest edited special issues of Musiktheorie (with Anne Shreffler) and The Wagner Journal, and edited and translated Carl Stumpf's The Origins of Music in 2012. See further details here.
EDUCATION
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Richard Wagner
19th-century opera, performance theory, nationalism, voice, history of aesthetics
Philosophy of Technology
Posthumanism, media archeology, digital culture
Franz Liszt
virtuosity, improvisation, Weimar, late style, spectacle
Sound & History and Philosophy of Science
acoustics, materialist philosophies of mind, forms of nature, modes of listening, theories of mechanism
2003-04
Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Leipzig
Magister study, solo piano
DAAD scholarship
2004-09
Harvard University
Ph.D. in Historical Musicology
A.M. in Historical Musicology
1999-2003
King's College, University of Cambridge
MusB
BA / MA in Music
Grants & Awards
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[2015] Principal Investigator for a European Research Council Starting Grant on a five-year research project, Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century
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[2014] Philip Leverhulme Prize in History from The Leverhulme Trust, which “recognises the achievement of early career researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising”
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[2014] Lewis Lockwood Award, of the American Musicological Society for “a musicological book of exceptional merit in any language and in any country by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career.”
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[2013] Bruno Nettl Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology for “an outstanding publication contributing to or dealing with the history of the field of ethnomusicology”
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[2013] Deems Taylor Award of the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for “excellence in writing on the subject of music.”
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[2012] Donald Tovey Memorial Prize of the University of Oxford for a work of “research in the philosophy, history or understanding of music”
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[2009] Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society for “an article of exceptional merit published in any language and in any country by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career.”