Dr Katherine Fry

Katherine Fry is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at King’s College London, having recently undertaken a secondment in the department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She has held previous appointments as a Lecturer in Musicology at KCL with an emphasis on academic education, and as a postdoctoral fellow on the ERC-funded project ‘Music in London 1800-1851’. She read music as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge before completing an MA and PhD at KCL.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Music and musical aesthetics in the long nineteenth century
• Print culture and media history
• Music/sound and gender studies

I work on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music history and Victorian sonic culture. My first book – provisionally entitled Wagner and Victorian Modernity – aims to provide a material history of Wagnerism and Anglo-German connections through the prism of London: a site of burgeoning mass media, multi-directional travel, and new sensory experiences. My current grant project (funded by the European Commission) explores the activities and networks of British women composers, poets and collectors of song as shaped by media history, cultural exchange and the urban environment during the period ca. 1820-1930. Other areas of research include nineteenth-century philosophies of music, periodical studies and women’s writing on sound and listening.

Selected Publications

‘Concert Hall Music Drama: from London to Bayreuth and Back Again’, (forthcoming)

‘Mary Somerville’s Sound Accomplishments’, in Sound and Sense in British Romanticism, ed. James Grande and Carmel Raz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)

‘Music and Character in the London Reception of Wagner: Conducting the Philharmonic ca. 1855’, in Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, ed. Sarah Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 201-219.

‘Not a “Telephone to the Beyond”: Nietzsche’s Early Writings on Music’, 19th-Century Music 42, no. 1 (2018): 53-70.

‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Musical Decadence: The Case of Wagner in Historical Perspective’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 142, no. 1 (2017): 137-172.

Teaching

I have taught topics in music history and sound studies from the late-18th century to the present, including introductory surveys and writing courses, in addition to in-depth modules reflecting my specialisms in opera, song, women composers/performers, urban culture and the boundaries of domestic space. I enjoy incorporating a variety of repertoire and media (classical, popular, film) and fostering student-led discussion of critical concepts, contexts and problems. At postgraduate level, I have taught courses and seminars in the fields of critical voice studies, contemporary musicology, and modernism.