SMA Committee

President: Julian Horton

Email: president@sma.ac.uk

Julian Horton is Professor of Music and Head of Department at Durham University. He has been Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor and Head of the School of Music at University College Dublin, and has also taught analysis at King’s College, London. Julian completed his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he held a Junior Research Fellowship from 1996–2000.

His research focuses on nineteenth-century instrumental music, with special interests in the analysis and reception of sonata forms, the theory of tonality, the symphony, and the piano concerto. His monograph Bruckner’s Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics is published by Cambridge University Press (2004). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony (2013), and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner and The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams. Publications in peer-reviewed journals include articles in Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters, and Music Analysis. In 2012, his article ‘John Field and the Alternative History of Concerto First-Movement Form’ was awarded the Westrup Prize, the annual outstanding publication award of the Music and Letters Trust. Recent publications include Rethinking Schubert, published by Oxford University Press and co-edited with Lorraine Byrne-Bodley, and a monograph on Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2.

Julian has been Critical Forum Editor of Music Analysis and serves on the advisory boards for Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Analysis in Context and Music Theory and Analysis. He is also a founder member of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and served two terms as a member of the Society’s Council. In 2009 he was awarded an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fellowship for work on the nineteenth-century piano concerto; he has subsequently been Principal Investigator for a Marie Curie Framework-Programme 7 Research Fellowship, investigating the reception of Brahms’ music.

Julian is also a composer, and (in his non-existent spare time) a keen amateur jazz guitarist.

Trustees

Esther Cavett

Email: esther.cavett@kcl.ac.uk

Esther is a Senior Research Fellow in Music at King’s College, London, where she is co-authoring a book on Howard Skempton.  She has been Vice-Chair of Governors of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music for eight years, and a Director of the City of London Festival, and now works with violinist Michael Bochmann on various projects for the charity Water City Music.  She has studied the piano with Guy Jonson, Susan Bradshaw and Thalia Myers. Esther started her working life as an academic musician and pianist, completing a doctorate on Mozart’s music, publishing music theory articles in JRMA, Music Analysis, and elsewhere, and teaching music at Oxford University, but took a twenty-year career break from music to go into the City as a lawyer, whilst always retaining her musical interests to which she has now returned.

Christopher Dromey

Email: C.Dromey@mdx.ac.uk
Chris Dromey is Associate Professor in Music at Middlesex University, where he teaches theory, analysis and business. A synopsis of his book on The Pierrot Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912-2012 (Plumbago, 2013) is available to read here. He has written on Benjamin Britten (Ashgate), Alexander Zemlinsky (Middlesex UP) and Peter Maxwell Davies (Routledge), and advanced some of his book’s themes in more recent publications on neomodernism hierarchical organisation in music. Chris is currently co-editing a volume for Routledge on The Classical Music Industry. Before Middlesex, he taught at the Open University, the Royal Opera House (Thomas Adès’s The Tempest), Birkbeck College, University of London (twentieth-century music), and King’s College London (music analysis). An active organist and pianist, Chris also writes for the London Chamber Music Society and convenes Middlesex’s Concerts and Colloquia, a Tuesday evening series open to the public featuring musicologists, executives, performers and composers (proposals from potential speakers are always welcome). Chris oversees Membership for the SMA.

J. P. E. Harper-Scott

Email: j.p.e.harper-scott@rhul.ac.uk

J. P. E. Harper-Scott is Professor of Music History and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests include British opera and concert music since 1890, particularly Elgar, Walton, Vaughan Williams, and Britten, as well as the operas of Wagner, Strauss, and Berlioz. His work draws extensively on philosophical, cultural, and social theory as well, always, as the explanatory resources of music analysis. From the start his work has engaged particularly with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. More recently, this has been supplemented by psychoanalysis (especially Lacan and Freud), critiques of the sexual, political, and economic subject (particularly the work of Alain Badiou, Karl Marx, and Slavoj Žižek), and an explicitly Leftist perspective. He is the author or editor of five books and a sixth, Ideology in Britten’s Operas, was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.

Shay Loya

Email: Shay.Loya@city.ac.uk

Shay Loya is a Lecturer in Music at City, University of London. He received his PhD at King’s College London in 2006, and previously lectured at the University in Durham (2007-8 as CETL Teaching Fellow and 2011-12). His research interests include Liszt, Hungarian-Gypsy music, analysing musical transculturation, 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 Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition (University of Rochester Press, 2011), and the  article ‘Recomposing National Identity: Four Transcultural Readings of Liszt’s Marche hongroise d’après Schubert’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 69.2 (2016): 409–67. He is currently working on Liszt’s late works and developing music analysis modules at City.

Ian Pace

Email: ian@ianpace.com

Ian Pace is Senior Lecturer in Music and Head of Performance at City, University of London, having previously held positions at the University of Southampton and Dartington College of Arts. His areas of academic expertise include nineteenth-century performance practice, comparative performance studies, issues of music and society (with particular reference to the Frankfurt School), contemporary performance practice and issues, music and culture under fascism, modernist music and its institutions, in particular in Germany, critical musicology, and music historiography. He co-edited and was a major contributor to the volume Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy, published by Ashgate in 1998, and authored the monograph Michael Finnissy’s The History of Photography in Sound: A Study of Sources, Techniques and Interpretation, published by Divine Art in 2013. He has also published many articles in Music and Letters, Contemporary Music Review, TEMPOThe Musical Times, The Liszt Society Journal, International Piano, Musiktexte, Musik & Ästhetik, The Open Space Magazine, as well as contributing many book chapters to edited volumes. The collection Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy: Bright Futures, Dark Pasts, co-edited with Nigel McBride, will appear from Routledge in April 2019, volumes on Writing on Contemporary Musicians and Writing about Contemporary Artists in Theory and Practice, from Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan respectively, both co-edited with Christopher Wiley, will appear in early 2020, and Rethinking Contemporary Musicologies: The Limits of Interdisciplinarity and the Dangers of Deskilling, co-edited with Peter Tregear, will appear from Routledge in 2020. Other forthcoming publications include monographs on music in Weimar and post-war Germany, a book on Brahms Performance Practice for Routledge, and a history of specialist musical education in Britain.

Kenneth Smith

Email: Kenneth.Smith@liverpool.ac.uk
Kenneth Smith is a senior 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- and 20th-century music and philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis and aesthetic theory. His monograph, Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire (2013), is an interdisciplinary study of Skryabin’s harmonic system and its roots in Russian culture and philosophy. Kenneth works broadly with neo-Riemannian theory and his current book project is entitled ­­Desire in Chromatic Harmony: A Psychodynamic Exploration of Fin de Siècle Tonality. Kenneth also publishes on popular music and is co-editing Expanded Approaches to Analyzing Popular Music (Routledge).

Christopher Tarrant

Email: musochris@googlemail.com

Christopher is a Lecturer in Music at Anglia Ruskin University. He completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2015 and has held teaching fellowships at Newcastle University and the University of Bristol. His research focuses on theories of form and their application to nineteenth-century instrumental music and the Nordic symphony, with a specific interest in Carl Nielsen. His PhD made a reassessment of Schubert’s sonata-form practice through a critical engagement with Sonata Theory in conjunction with ideas drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has published articles in the International Journal of Žižek Studies and the Danish Yearbook of Musicology. As well as historical musicology and analysis, Christopher has wider teaching interests in performance, counterpoint and harmony, orchestration, and conducting, and is currently developing courses in those areas at Anglia Ruskin.

Officers

Equality and Diversity Officer: Anne Hyland

Email: anne.hyland@manchester.ac.uk

Anne Hyland is Lecturer in Music Analysis at the University of Manchester and Critical Forum Editor for Music Analysis. She completed her PhD at King’s College, University of Cambridge in 2010, and subsequently held lecturing appointments at Trinity College, Dublin (2011–12) and Royal Holloway, University of London (2012–14). Her research interests range across the analysis, reception history, and editing of Schubert’s instrumental music; the history and theory of form (especially sonata and variation forms); musical temporality; the Viennese string quartet, and intersections between music historiography and analysis. She has published in Music Analysis (2009 – awarded the journal’s 25th Anniversary Prize), Music Theory Spectrum (2016), Rethinking Schubert (OUP, 2016), Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory Style (CUP, 2016), and The String Quartet: from the Private to the Public Sphere (Brepols, 2016). She is the recipient of a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Research Grant for a project investigating the performance and publication of string quartets in the first three decades of the nineteenth century in Vienna, and she is currently writing a monograph on Schubert’s String Quartets for Cambridge University Press.

Executive Officer: Ross Edwards

Email: exec@sma.ac.uk

Ross is currently reading for a PhD in music theory and analysis at the University of Liverpool under the supervision of Dr Kenneth Smith and Professor Michael Spitzer. His thesis, Modulation in a New Key: Towards a Generalised Theory of Post-Tonal Modulation, attempts to carve out a new formula for post-tonal modulation, focussing in particular on a dynamic repertoire of early-twentieth-century, post-Wagnerian works that problematise the conceptual boundary between tonality and so-called atonalityCalling upon music theory, contemporary analysis, and philosophy, this research centres on a model of tonal motion and meaning that attempts to tie together several music-theoretical threads (running from neo-Riemannian Funktionstheorie and broader Energeticist conceptions of harmonic form), and sit them within the context of the musical landscapes of the twentieth century. His interests therefore concern the historico-philosophical narratives surrounding tonality and modernism, and the literature’s more pervasive metaphors regarding tonal space, musical forces, and structural hearing.

During his time as an undergraduate (2012), Masters student (2013), and currently a third-year doctoral candidate (2015-16)—Ross has lectured in music analysis, theory, aesthetics, and philosophy, served as a student representative on several boards and committees, and assisted in the publication of several scholarly books.

Ross oversees the financial affairs of the society.

Administrator: Becky Thumpston

Email: administrator@sma.ac.uk

Becky is a Research Associate at the Royal Northern College of Music. Her research is focused on theories of agency and embodiment, and British music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Becky completed her PhD ‘Agency in twentieth-century British cello music’ at Keele University in 2015. She has published on the music of Benjamin Britten and Simon Holt and has a forthcoming edited collection with Nicholas Reyland: Music, Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments (Peeters, Leuven Studies in Musicology). She has lectured in theory and analysis at Keele University and is a Teaching Affiliate at the University of Nottingham.

Becky oversees the administration of the Society.

Student Representatives

Email: students@sma.ac.uk

Anna Kent-Muller

Anna is a doctoral candidate in Music and Web Science at the University of Southampton, under the supervision of David Bretherton and Nicholas Gibbins. Her research proposes that score-based musical analysis can provide a more useful similarity comparison than audio analysis in similarity recommendation. Here she proposes objective techniques of analysis to provide a measure of similarity between two pieces of music.

Anna’s passion for our field is shown through her involvement with the community. Currently, she represents music postgraduate researchers on Southampton music department’s student staff liaison committee. In 2016, Anna was awarded an AHRC transforming digital musicology scholarship to attend the digital humanities oxford summer school to further investigate the use of digital technologies in music research. In Oct 2017, she presented her first conference paper, ‘Big Musicology: A Framework for transformation’ as part of the Digital libraries for musicology workshop, a satellite event of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference in Suzhou, China. She has upcoming work for the RMA student conference (Jan 2018), and has been invited to present at DANS (Jan 2018), the Netherlands institute for the permanent access to digital research resources, as part of their humanities project CLARIAH.