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My favourite memory of Queen’s

Celebrating graduation with my daughter, husband and closest friends I made at Queen’s. My journey to graduation wasn’t straightforward. I passed my confirmation viva whist pregnant and returned from maternity leave during the pandemic. Borrowing and returning books turned into watching my daughter learn how to crawl, to walk and run through the stone corridors and the MCR. So, when I finally achieved my goal of graduating with my DPhil, witnessing her twirl down Front Quad in her party dress, sit on my dear friend’s lap during the celebratory toasts, and applaud for all my hard work will be one of my most cherished memories forever.

What Queen’s means to me

Home.

My journey since leaving Queen’s

Prior to Queen’s, I performed on cruise ships and at theme parks. I left performing to pursue a career in academia. During my DPhil, I held a part-time lectureship at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Then, I was fortunate to accept a full-time lectureship at University of Leeds before my graduation and have since achieved the rank of Associate Professor.

Introduction

I was born in 西安Xi’an, China and raised in East Tennessee, USA. Having trained as a classical pianist in my childhood, I competed and performed across the world, eventually receiving generous scholarships from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to attend Choate Rosemary Hall, Princeton University (A.B., Music), and Duke Divinity School (M.Div.). Currently I am completing my PhD Candidacy in Music Theory at the University of Michigan, and I’ve lived in Oxford since 2023 with my wife and children.

Teaching

I teach all three years of music analysis for Queen’s alongside students from other colleges. Besides covering various schools of formenlehre, Schenkerian, and Neo-Riemannian analysis for Western repertory from the 18th-20th century, my specific pedagogical approach emphasizes a detailed close reading of each piece that never loses sight of a student’s own unique, intuitive perception of a piece.

Research

My current research focuses on early Chinese 古琴 guqin (seven-stringed zither) music, with the aim of recovering the “native” music theory embedded in adjacent historical texts in order to better analyze the surviving notated pieces. I am also part of an international research team that recently won a major grant supporting the use of AI in the study of such a large musical corpus. Here my immediate work involves both close textual study as well as the development of analog and predictive analytical tools, with an eye toward understanding the idiomatic styles and cosmological worldview placed upon such music by its dynastic literati creators. My larger research aim involves distilling the sacred or theological notions expressed through music in general, having also presented studies on Messiaen, Pärt, and Mompou at American and European academic conferences.

Publications

Forthcoming articles:

  • The Multiple Pentatonic Systems of the Wusheng Qinpu (Asian Musicology, 36)
  • Translation and Commentary of two Chinese music theoretical texts (Thinking Music, University of Chicago, OPS)
  • The Aural Logos of Maximus Confessor and Arvo Pärt (Special Volume on Theology, Music and Time, INMT)

About me

Hi! I’m Tom, and I’m a first-year Music student at Queen’s. I’m from London (although Cyprus originally), and moving to Oxford was my first time living in a different city. I wanted to study Music as its interdisciplinary nature really excited me – you can choose to study its aspects of history, politics, philosophy, geography, mathematics, psychology, the list is endless. The intersection of the changing role of music in our every day lives across multimedia forms was also a key interest which I wanted to keep exploring.

College experience

My favourite thing about Queen’s is the choir and EMS (our College music society)! Taking a break from work to sing through some fun a capella arrangements on a Saturday afternoon is probably the highlight of my week. It is also incredible fun singing evensongs with very supportive and talented people, as well as the tours and album recordings.

Oxford life

I always try to start the day right with breakfast in Hall, and will likely have a few hours of tutorials or lectures in the morning at the Music Faculty. I’ll then often take an hour or so to catch up with friends after lectures (Independent Cafe opposite the Music Fac is a must), and then head back to College for lunch. I’ll then spend a few hours working in the library, before more tutorials or choir. Depending on the workload, I’ll then either head back to the library after choir and dinner, which may or may not be preceded by choir drinks…

Advice for applicants

Don’t be ashamed of your interests, especially if you think they might not be ‘academic’. Most of my personal statement and interests during my application were in k-pop, Into the Woods, and Jacob Collier, so don’t feel you have to just be excited by Mozart string quartets to apply.

Introduction

Throughout secondary school and University in Canada I studied flute performance, receiving a Bachelor of Music degree from McGill University. After a few years of freelance gigging as a flutist and a music critic, I began graduate study—first at McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada) and then at Cornell University. I’ve been teaching in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley since 1996.

Teaching

At Berkeley I regularly teach courses on the history and appreciation of opera and classical music. As a specialist in vocal music and music-text relations, I’ve also begun to teach courses on music in popular culture, including a workshop-based seminar on Songs and Songwriting and a lecture course on Music and Data, which covers the mechanics and politics of music recommendation systems and their algorithms, the uses of data analysis for music studies, and music creation with software.

Research

Much of my research has focused on social dimensions of opera in nineteenth-century Europe. My first book, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (2004), drew on textual sources (treatises on acting, staging manuals) and musical evidence to suggest close ties between musical patterns and physical gesture in repertory stretching from the first French grand operas of the 1830s to Verdi’s Aida and Wagner’s Ring. My second book, Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815–1848 (2018) tackled the question of how opera mattered to audiences in nineteenth-century Italy and how it made a difference to political and social realities during that period. 

I am currently working on two book-length projects—a theoretical study of trends in opera production since 1970 and an alternative history of French theories of voice, music, and language in the twentieth century, extending from Proust through the speech archive of Ferdinand Brunot, Michel Leiris’s flamboyantly operatic memoirs, cabaret songs based on the poetry of Raymond Queneau, and the austere audiovisual experiments of Alain Resnais. With David Levin (University of Chicago), I co-edit the book series Opera Lab for the University of Chicago Press. 

Publications

  • “Elephants in the Music Room: The Future of Quirk Historicism,” introduction to a special issue on Quirk Historicism, co-authored with Nicholas Mathew, Representations 132 (Fall 2015), 61-78
  • “Michel Leiris and the Secret Language of Song,” Representations 154/1 (Spring 2021)
  • “Radical Staging and the Habitus of the Singer,” in Investigating Musical Performance: Towards a Conjunction of Ethnographic and Historiographic Perspectives (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2020)
  • Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (edited collection) (Princeton University Press, 2000)

Courses

  • BA Music

Average intake at Queen’s: 4

The Course

The three-year Music course offers wide-ranging coverage of music in its historical and cultural contexts, study of musical genres, forms and styles, compositional techniques, and performance, and allows increasing specialisation in one or more areas as students proceed through the course. Combined with the extremely rich opportunities for performance in the College and the University, the course helps every student to graduate as a mature and well-rounded musician with an informed and lively sense of the study and practice of the subject.

There are excellent facilities in College for practical music. These include the award-winning Shulman Auditorium (completed in 2012) with Steinway grand piano, two Music Practice Rooms (both with pianos and harpsichords), and a grand piano, two-manual harpsichord, and chamber organ (by Robin Jennings, 2024) in chapel. The main chapel organ, by Frobenius (1965), is internationally esteemed and used for weekly recitals during full term. Music students are provided with an electric piano in their room.

The College offers Choral Scholarships each year, as well as Organ Scholarships and Instrumental Awards.

Teaching

The number of academic staff in music at Queen’s, and the diversity of their academic interests, means that many parts of the course are taught within the College. Queen’s is also committed to securing specialist teaching in other colleges for its students as appropriate.

The first year of the course provides a solid foundation in musical skills, and helps you to develop new ways of thinking about music, in terms of cultural and historical contexts, analysis, and techniques of composition. Students also choose two out of six elements from: performance, composition, extended essay, musical skills (including conducting and arranging), ethnomusicology, and historically informed performance. During the second and third years of the course broad study of music history, analysis, and musical scholarship and culture is combined with a huge choice of options, including project work (such as a dissertation), performance, composition, ethnomusicology, and specialist study of subjects (from early music to aspects of contemporary musical culture) reflecting the research expertise of Faculty staff. Performance-related options include courses in chamber-music performance, choral conducting, choral performance, community music and education, and recording and producing music.

Admissions

Queen’s has a strong tradition in both academic and practical music (both choral and instrumental), and achieves very strong academic results in this subject. The College normally admits four undergraduate students to read Music each year, making it one of the larger colleges for this subject in terms of academic places. Please see more information on the application process here.


Introduction

I began my academic studies at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where I read Music. After taking a year out to focus on my career in drag performance, I began at Oxford in 2015, where I completed the MSt in Musicology at Wadham College, before beginning my doctoral research at St Catherine’s College. My position at Queen’s is my first academic post.

Teaching

My teaching focuses on music from the 19th century onwards and engages a broad interdisciplinary theoretical apparatus. I teach papers ranging from Global Hip Hop and World Jazz to Musical Thought and Scholarship, endeavouring in each to foreground marginalised voices.

Research

My research interrogates lip-syncing in drag performance. I’m particularly interested in how the voice functions in such settings, and what the benefits are for the drag queens who employ this unique mode of voicing. More broadly, my research interests revolve around phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

Publications

  • Forthcoming: “The Cyborg Queen: Lip-Syncing and Posthumanism in ShayShay’s ‘Mutual Core’”, in Contemporary Music Review, Special Issue: Music and Materialism.
  • Forthcoming: Review, “Lipsynching. By Merrie Snell. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 185 pp. ISBN 978-1-5013-5234-8”, in Popular Music.
  • “Haptic Aurality: On Touching the Voice in Drag Lip-Sync Performance”, in Sound Studies (2019) Volume 6, Number 1, pp. 45-64.


Introduction

My undergraduate studies in Music were at Cambridge, where I held an Organ Scholarship. After this, I pursued doctoral research in Portugal, and then moved to Oxford as Lecturer at St Peter’s College and St Edmund Hall. I then spent six years teaching at the University of Surrey, before taking up my post at Queen’s in 1997. As Organist at Queen’s I direct the Chapel Choir, and work with the Organ Scholars in planning the choir’s activities, including thrice-weekly services in term-time, concerts, tours, recordings, and broadcasts. I also organise (with the assistance of the Organ Scholars) a series of weekly organ recitals in term-time on the College’s fine Frobenius organ.

Teaching

My tutorial teaching covers many aspects of the Oxford undergraduate course, including music history from the Middle Ages to the end of the Baroque, and techniques of composition. I supervise postgraduate students in areas related to my own research. I also lecture at the Faculty of Music, particularly in my research field of Renaissance vocal music, and in historically informed performance and choral conducting.

Research

My research focuses on sacred music in Spain, Portugal, and England during the Renaissance and seventeenth century. I have written about the music of William Byrd, and many of the greatest Spanish and Portuguese composers of the period. As a conductor, I direct the Chapel Choir at Queen’s, as well as the professional vocal consort Contrapunctus. My conducting work has several times been nominated for the Gramophone early-music award, and I tour extensively in Europe and beyond with the groups I direct.

Publications

  • ‘“That Worishh, that Devillishe, and Faithlesse Song”: Byrd’s Salve regina in Context’, in Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Samantha Bassler, Katie Bank, & Katherine Butler (Clemson: 2023)
  • The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603) (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
  • ‘Seville Cathedral’s Music in Performance, 1549–1599’, in Colin Lawson & Robin Stowell (eds), The Cambridge History of Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 353–74
  • Cristóbal de Morales: Sources, Inflences, Reception, co-edited with Bernadette Nelson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007)
  • ‘Adventures of Portuguese “Ancient Music” in Oxford, London, and Paris: Duarte Lobo’s Liber missarum and Musical Antiquarianism, 1650–1850’, Music & Letters 86 (2005), 42–73
  • Polyphony in Portugal c. 1530-c. 1620: Sources from the Monastery of Santa Cruz, Coimbra (New York & London: Garland, 1995)
  • ‘The English Background to Byrd’s Motets: Textual and Stylistic Models for Infelix ego’, in Byrd Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 24–50