Committee

President: Michael Spitzer

Email: president@sma.ac.uk

Michael Spitzer is a Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool. He studied at Oxford and Southampton, where he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on late Beethoven. His research interests are divided equally between music theory, musicology and aesthetics, with an historical focus on the classical style. These interests have come together in two books: Metaphor and Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Indiana University Press, 2006), as well as numerous articles. Recent studies include ‘The Metaphor of Musical Space’, Musicae Scientiae 7/1 (2003), ‘Tovey’s Evolutionary Metaphors’, Music Analysis 24/3 (2005), and ‘A Metaphoric Model of Sonata Form: Two Expositions by Mozart’, in Kofi Agawu and Danuta Mirka (eds.), Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is currently researching music and emotion. He is Associate Editor of Music Analysis.

Vice-President & Events Officer: Kenneth Smith

Email: events@sma.ac.uk

Kenneth Smith is a lecturer in music at the University of Liverpool. He completed his PhD at Durham University in 2009 and subsequently held teaching fellowships at Durham and Keele. Whilst his research is analytical in focus, other areas of interest include: 19th-20th Century music and philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis and aesthetic theory. His forthcoming monograph – Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire (RMA Monographs) – is an interdisciplinary study of Skryabin’s harmonic system and its roots in Russian culture and philosophy. He has researched the songs of Charles Ives and the operas of Alexander Zemlinsky with several articles recently appearing in print: ‘A Science of Tonal Love? Drive and Desire in Twentieth Century Harmony: The Erotics of Alexander Skryabin’, Music Analysis, 30; ‘Lacan, Zemlinsky and Der Zwerg: Mirror, Metaphor and Fantasy’, Perspectives of New Music, 48/2; ‘The Tonic Chord and Lacan’s Object a in Selected Songs by Charles Ives’, Journal of the RMA 136/2; ‘Skryabin’s Revolving Harmonies, Lacanian Desire and Riemannian Funktionstheorie’, Twentieth Century Music 7/2.

Treasurer & Administrator: David Bretherton

Email: treasurer@sma.ac.uk

David Bretherton studied piano at Chetham’s School of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, before completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Reading with Jonathan Dunsby. He later studied for a doctorate at the University of Oxford with Suzannah Clark, writing a thesis entitled ‘The Poetics of Schubert’s Song-Forms’ that examined how Schubert combined elements of the previously distinct traditional Lied and dramatic ballad so as to create more sophisticated and expressive song-forms. As well as music theory and analysis, Schubert, and song, his research interests include computational musicology and web-science. Since November 2007 David has been a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, attached first to the musicSpace and MusicNet music and e-science research projects, and then, since January 2011, to Schenker Documents Online.

Information Officer: Shay Loya

Email: information@sma.ac.uk

Shay Loya received his PhD at King’s College London in 2006. In 2007-8 he was a CETL Teaching Fellow at Durham University, and he is currently dividing his time between teaching there and working as a freelance teacher and independent scholar. His research interests include Liszt, Hungarian-Gypsy music, transculturation and its application to music analysis, and other critical and aesthetic issues in music of the long nineteenth century. He has presented numerous papers in international conferences and his main publications include a recent book – Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition (Rochester University Press, forthcoming this December) – and the article ‘Beyond the Stereotype: Harmonic and Structural Aspects of the Verbunkos Idiom’, Journal of Musicological Research, 27/2 (August, 2008), 254-280.

Student Representatives: Michelle Phillips & Suzie Wilkins

Email: students@sma.ac.uk

Michelle Phillips completed her BA and MA at the University of Nottingham, and is now in her second year of PhD study at the University of Cambridge, working with Dr Ian Cross in the Centre for Music and Science. Her work examines the golden section and Fibonacci numbers in music and music analysis, focussing on whether such mathematical relations may be perceived during music listening. She is pursuing this line of enquiry through empirical work on the notion of musical time.

Suzie Wilkins is a DPhil student at the University of Sussex where she also completed her BA (2008) and MA (2009). Her research uses a reception-based approach to aesthetic experience, particularly focussing on the instrumental and orchestral music of the 18th-21st centuries. As part of this, Suzie is examining a series of case-studies and creating a dialogue between a close, analytical reading of scores and their broader contexts. For the past three years Suzie has enjoyed conducting the University of Sussex Concert Band.