Department of Music

Andy Fry joined King’s in 2007, having previously taught at the University of California, San Diego and, as a visiting professor, at Berkeley. He completed his graduate studies at Oxford, and has also studied at the Universities of Lancaster, California (Berkeley), and Pennsylvania. His principal research areas are Jazz (particularly pre-1950, race, gender, and historiography) and music in twentieth-century France. In addition, he has strong interests in musical theatre, in all its many forms. Several of these concerns come together in his published articles, on Josephine Baker, jazz, and black shows in interwar France. Fry has also spoken widely on such subjects at conferences and invited talks in Britain, the US, and occasionally further afield. As well as courses in Jazz, he teaches a module on Western Music and Race. He is completing a monograph on African-American Music and Musicians in Paris to 1960.

020 7848 1821

Bettina Varwig was an undergraduate at King’s College London and completed her graduate studies at Harvard. She has since held a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cambridge, and has also taught at the University of Bristol. Bettina’s research focuses on music and cultural history in early modern Europe, in particular German music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. She is interested in issues of cultural exchange and transmission, religious practices and processes of secularisation, historical modes of music analysis and listening, as well as the formation of German musicology as a discipline in the decades around 1900. Her recent publications address aspects of music and rhetoric, J. S. Bach’s cantatas and his audiences, and the seventeenth-century historiography of ‘new’ music. At present she is completing a monograph on Heinrich Schütz, discussing his role in seventeenth-century musical culture and his twentieth-century reception. Bettina will join the music department at King’s in October 2009.

+44 (0)20 7848 2729

The bulk of my research centres on Mozart and music of the late eighteenth-century including history and biography, analysis, source studies, performance practice, Mozart's cultural context and Mozart historiography. The theoretical heart of much of this research is biography broadly understood, the idea that no matter how divorced we may think we are from biography, it is the narratives we construct of composers' lives that motivate, both historically and in the present, the ways in which we read Mozart's music and the analytical methods we have constructed to understand his works. The practical consequences of this theoretical stance is to increase the number of different and new ways in which we can understand the composer. Beyond Mozart, though, my research also includes Broadway musicals of the period 1930-1960 - again with an emphasis on holisitic readings based on sources, documents, history, cultural context and analysis - as well as 20th-century American song (Porter, Gershwin, Styne, Arlen and others) and popular music of the 1960s.

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020 7848 2326

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson studied composition, harpsichord and organ at the Royal College of Music, then took the MMus at King's specialising in 15th-century music. Following doctoral research at Cambridge, working on 14th-century techniques of composition, he became a Fellow of Churchill College. He taught at Nottingham and Southampton universities before rejoining the Music Department at King's College in September 1997.

Until 2002 his main research was in fourteenth-century French music, though he has also published on performance practice and Renaissance topics, and his analytical interests include the French Baroque and music since 1945. He published books on fourteenth-century compositional technique and on Machaut's "Messe de Nostre Dame", as well as the first complete edition of Machaut's autobiographical romance Le Voir Dit (Garland, 1998). His 2002 book, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music (Cambridge, 2002) looked at the way medieval music was reimagined through the 19th and 20th centuries, seeing it as a case study of the ideology of historical musicology.

He now works on musical communication via expressive performance, seen in the light of current work on music and the brain. His article on 'Portamento and Musical Meaning' was published in the Journal of Musicological Research in 2006. A on the study of musical performances appeared in 2009. He received funding for a five-year project on "Expressivity in Schubert Song Performance" within the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). He is also directing a large-scale digitisation project, making available 78rpm recordings from the King's Sound Archive online. He is currently working on "Performers' Perceptions of Music as Shape" within the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice.

+44 (0)20 7848 2576

David Trendell has been College Organist and Lecturer in Music at King's since 1992. In that time he has established the chapel choir as one of the finest mixed-voice university choirs in the country. They have made several recordings in recent years of sixteenth-century music, thus tying in with Trendell's research interests. Their disc of Taverner's Missa Corona spinea was nominated for a Gramophone award in the Early Music category and their disc of music by Alonso Lobo was chosen by Gramphone reviewer, Tess Knighton, as one of her two favourite CDs of the year. More recently, they have continued their relationship with Sanctuary's Gaudeamus label by recording music by Sebastian de Vivanco and they have also recorded a disc of music for Advent with the renowned viol consort Phantasm on the Herald label.

Trendell was educated as an organ scholar at Exeter College, Oxford, and, prior to his arrival at King's was Lecturer at St Hilda's, St Hugh's and Oriel Colleges. He is much in demand as a choral conductor and frequently directs choral workshops in the USA.

In recent years the choir has toured the USA, France, Ireland and Italy.

+44 (0)20 7848 2600

George Benjamin succeeded Sir Harrison Birtwistle as Henry Purcell Professor on Composition at King's College in January 2001.

He gives a series of lectures each year, open to all music students, which cover a wide variety of subjects. These range from abstract topics ("thematicism", "symmetry in music", "the bass in modern music") to more specific areas of musical thought, including the analysis of individual works by composers ranging from Mozart to Boulez and beyond.

He gives individual lessons to post-graduate composers; over the past six years he has accepted students from the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Jordan, USA, Israel, Japan and Australia. While he occasionally supervises PhDs in composition, he has a strong preference for the year-long MMus course.

Born in 1960, George Benjamin started to play the piano at the age of seven, and began composing almost immediately. In 1976 he entered the Paris Conservatoire to study with Olivier Messiaen (composition) and Yvonne Loriod (piano), after which he studied under Alexander Goehr at King's College Cambridge.

Since his first orchestral piece, "Ringed by the Flat Horizon", was performed at the BBC Proms in 1980 his works have continued to be performed across the world. In recent years there have been major retrospectives of his work in Tanglewood, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Berlin, Strasbourg, Madrid and Paris.

As a conductor he regularly appears with some of the world's leading ensembles and orchestras, amongst them the the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, the Cleveland and Concertgebouw orchestras and the Berlin Philharmonic. He has conducted numerous world premieres, including important works by Rihm, Chin, Grisey and Ligeti.

He was made a Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996 and was elected to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, only the fourth time such an honour has been bestowed on a British composer. In 2001 he was awarded the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester's first ever Schoenberg Prize for composition.

His works are recorded on Nimbus Records www.wyastone.co.uk, and are published by Faber Music in London www.fabermusic.co.uk 

John Deathridge has been King Edward Professor of Music since 1996, when he joined the Department from the University of Cambridge. He has also taught at the Universities of Princeton and Chicago and continues to be active as a performer and regular broadcaster. In 2005 he was elected President of the Royal Musical Association.

John Deathridge’s main research interests are German music, in particular Richard Wagner, and social theory. His groundbreaking work on Wagner is reflected in his book on Rienzi (Oxford 1977) and three collaborative publications, The New Grove Wagner (with Carl Dahlhaus), the WWV: Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen (with Martin Geck and Egon Voss), and the Wagner Handbook (with Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski). He is also co-editor of a new critical edition of Lohengrin which appeared as an Eulenburg score in 2007, and the author of Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley 2008).

020 7848 2793

john.deathridge@kcl.ac.uk

A cultural historian and ethnomusicologist, Katherine Butler Brown has recently joined King’s following a lectureship at the University of Leeds. Having trained originally as a viola player, she embarked on postgraduate work at SOAS in the cultural history of North Indian music, followed by a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Katherine’s research interests lie in the areas of South Asian music, the history of Mughal India (1526-1858), music and Islam, and music and empire. They include the intersection of music with politics, gender, male friendship, love, sexuality, social class, and Indian medicine; patronage and musicianship; connoisseurship and the idea of classicism; social liminality; female and male courtesans; the social history of North Indian musicians, dancers and actors; and Indo-Persian writings on Hindustani music. Katherine also has interests in modern South Asian female vocalists; British Asian vernacular musics, particularly new Muslim devotional sounds; and transitions from the Mughal to the British empires as manifested in the North Indian musical field. Katherine is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and was the 2003 recipient of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Charles Seeger Prize. In her spare time she sings folk and choral music, and occasionally still plays the fiddle.

+44 (0)20 7848 2384

Ethnomusicology, with a particular interest in social and cultural theory; theorizing music cross-culturally in broader systems of emotion transmission and distribution; the anthropology of music; Middle Eastern and European music

Dr. Matthew Head, a graduate of Oxford and Yale, is a specialist in music of the European Enlightenment. He has published on C. P. E. Bach, Minna Brandes, Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and Sophie Westenholz, exploring issues of musical character, performance, improvisation, genre, authorship, orientalism and gender. Matthew is currently working on a book of essays on music, gender and authorship in the later 18th century.

+44 (0)20 7848 2122

Michael Fend studied Musicology with Carl Dahlhaus at the University of Berlin, as well as German Literature and Philosophy. For his PhD he translated and critically commented on a Renaissance music treatise in which the author attempted to construct an irrefutable theory of tonality. He pursued the history of Renaissance pre-rational and symbolic thinking at the Warburg Institute in London, where he had also come to learn English without realising that this would become a lifelong task.

Here he pursued a project on non-classical traditions in Opera around 1800. It concerned him that the German repertoire had dominated the historic and normative concept of what was considered 'classical' music. Focussing on Cherubini's operatic dramaturgies, contemporary aesthetics and on institutional practices he has tried to establish the conditions under which Cherubini could continue in his metier during the Revolutionary process. Cherubinis Pariser Opern (1788-1803) was published in 2007. He has also acted as co-editor in a project by 30 scholars into the history of the conservatoire in Europe, funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and published in 2005.

His field is the intellectual history of music, which takes into account the relevant biographical and institutional factors to get a more 'real' view of the forces shaping musical culture.

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Rob Keeley studied with Oliver Knussen at the Royal College of Music, Magdalen College Oxford under Bernard Rose, and later with Robert Saxton. In 1988 he studied at the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome with Franco Donatoni, and at the Tanglewood Summer Music School, where he was the Benjamin Britten Fellow in Composition, working with Oliver Knussen and Hans Werner Henze. Before joining King’s in 1993 Rob was a freelance pianist and repetiteur, working for Opera Factory, Almeida Opera and Garsington Opera. He has also played with the London Sinfonietta and Music Projects/London, and now gives frequent solo recitals covering a wide range of repertoire.

Rob has premiered works by, among others, Harrison Birtwistle, Michael Finnissy, Jonathan Cole and Richard Emsley. He has given lecture recitals in 20th-century piano music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and seminars on his own music at UC Berkeley and the University of Oregon, Eugene.

His works have been performed by, among others: BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Lontano, Premiere Ensemble, Ensemble Bash, pianists Martin Roscoe and Colin Stone, guitarists Jonathan Leathwood and Fabio Zanon, bass player Corrado Canonici, oboist Chris Redgate, the Chinook Clarinet Quartet, Fretwork and Composers' Ensemble .

+44 (0)20 7848 2486

Roger Parker is Thurston Dart Professor of Music. He studied at the University of London, first at Goldsmiths' College, then at King's College. In 1982 he moved to Cornell University in upstate New York, where he was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor. In 1994 he came back to England to become a Lecturer in Music (later Professor) and Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford. In 1999 he became Professor of Music at Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of St John's College and (in 2005-6) Chair of the School of Arts and Humanities. In 2002 he was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley; in 2007 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; in 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Since 2006 he has been delivering free public lectures as the Professor of Music at Gresham College.

Roger Parker's work has centred on opera, in particular Italian opera of the nineteenth century. For ten years he was founding co-editor (with Arthur Groos) of the Cambridge Opera Journal, and he continues as General Editor (with Gabriele Dotto) of the Donizetti Critical Edition. He received the Premio Giuseppe Verdi in 1986, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1986-7, and in 1991 was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association.

+44 (0)20 7848 2392

Silvina Milstein studied at Glasgow University, where her composition teachers were Judith Weir and Lyell Cresswell, and at Cambridge University where she worked with Alexander Goehr. In the 1980s she held research fellowships at Jesus College and King's College, Cambridge. She has received commissions from leading ensembles and the BBC.

Her book Arnold Schoenberg: notes, sets, forms (Cambridge University Press, 1992) proposes a reconstruction of Schoenberg's conception of compositional process in the twelve-tone composition and explores the extent of the remnants of tonal thought operating in this music.

Early compositions include Sombras (co-winner of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust/SPNM Orchestral Award 1985). In the String Quartet of 1989, serial writing is abandoned in favour of a melodically based mode of composition.

The decade ending in 1995 is dominated by Música Ciudadana (BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Odaline de la Martinez) which draws it melodic shapes and sonorities from the vernacular music of Buenos Aires, and by a series of large-scale vocal scores. In 2000 the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of a media luz. Last July Tigres Azules (London Sinfonietta, Oliver Knussen) was performed by the Ensemble Modern (Kaspar da Roo) at the ISCM World Music Days in Stuttgart.

Silvina is currently working on a piece for the London Sinfonietta and researching on the nature of imagery and phraseology in middle-period Schoenberg.

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