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About me

Hi I’m Rosanna and I come from St Albans. I’m a third-year musician here at Queen’s, and chose to study music because I’ve been singing since I was six and love how music is such an integral part of so many societies and cultures! I’ve been lucky enough to write about such a variety of topics, including the music of the Sámi people to the music of Doctor Who, Hip Hop, Opera, String Quartets, as well as doing analysis, performance, and pastiche composition! There’s a huge amount of breadth in music courses so you’re bound to find your niche!

I love how ‘Oxford-y’ Queen’s is in looks (especially the chapel and the library) yet how down-to-earth and friendly we are as a college!

College Experience

I’m currently living in college, in Back Quad. This means it’s very easy for me to pop down for a full English breakfast first thing (unless I’m doing a 6 am rowing outing which means breakfast will have to wait!). As well as rowing, I’ve dabbled in college netball as well as setting up a Queen’s women’s rugby team. Training and matches for these tend to be on the weekend and often allow for more of a lie-in. 

For music, lectures are scheduled in the morning and then tutorials are organised to fit around those. If I’m not headed to one of these, I’ll usually go to the Queen’s library to get some work done. Lunch is usually found in hall or I’ll venture somewhere like the covered market. A mid afternoon coffee (or hot chocolate for me as I still don’t drink coffee!) is a must as well. My favourites are JCT and missing bean.  I’m also a member of the choir here at Queen’s. We sing evensong on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Being in the choir is very manageable alongside my degree as choir rehearsals begins at around 5 pm which is after most tutorials! A highlight is always dinner in hall after evensong and then a trip to the Beer Cellar (our college bar) or a local pub (often Turf or the King’s Arms). There are so many plays, musicals, concerts & gigs happening in that my evenings are often filled attending (or singing in) some of these too!

Advice for applicants

My biggest advice for applicants preparing for their interviews is to talk, talk, talk about their subject. At the dinner table, to yourself (record a voice note?), in a mock interview. It makes articulating your thoughts in the actual interview so much easier!

About me

I’m Hattie, a second-year music student at Queen’s. I’m originally from Guildford, in Surrey, and attended a state school.  

I love studying music at Oxford because it is so broad and interdisciplinary. In my first year alone, I studied everything from French medieval polyphony to global hip hop, week-to-week learning all sorts of different information and skills. Like all Oxford subjects, we have tutorials (typically 2-3 a week for music) which involve a small group of students and a tutor discussing the work for the week – usually, for music, an essay. This immediate feedback and chance to explore your ideas further with experts and your peers makes the course so rewarding, and is one of the unique things about the Oxford course. 

College experience

Queen’s as a college is beautiful and super friendly – the size is also good as there are lots of people to meet but not too many that it becomes overwhelming. My favourite thing about Queen’s is the active music scene. We have the oldest music society in Oxford, the Eglesfield Musical Society, which runs an orchestra, acapella group, jazz band and puts on termly concerts, open mic nights, musical theatre nights and the annual Queen’s musical. It was so enriching to be involved in EMS in my first year, participating in lots of music and meeting a wonderful group of people. I am the president for the 2023/24 academic year, and I can’t wait to put on more amazing music events at Queen’s! 

Life at Oxford

In terms of the wider University, one of the wonderful things about Oxford is its choral scene. Queen’s itself has an amazing choir, but I sing in Merton College Choir. We sing three services a week during term time, as well as frequent concerts, recordings, broadcasts and an annual tour. Being in Merton choir has also given me a wider social circle, as a lot of the choir are from different colleges. The choral scholarship scheme at Oxford is, again, something that makes it unique, so if you’re a singer in any way, I would really encourage you to investigate it. There are many choirs with different ability and commitment levels, and everyone I know who is a choral scholar absolutely loves it. 

In addition to musical activities, I have been involved in the Oxford 93% club, the state school society, taking the role of access officer for the next year. This is a great way to meet people of similar backgrounds, as well as being part of the work to make Oxford a more inclusive and transparent place. 

Advice for applicants

My overall advice to anyone considering Oxford is to just go for it! Specifically for music, I would encourage you to read around or do an online course in some aspect that really interests you, as this gives you something to write about in your personal statement as well as for your swritten work. For interview prep, practice talking about your ideas, whether this is with a teacher, parent, friend, or pet! I felt having some practice talking about the subject made it much less daunting in the actual interview.  

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)

Course

  • BA (Hons) 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.

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.

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 historical and cultural contexts, analysis, and techniques of composition). Students also choose two out of four elements from: performance, composition, extended essay, and a paper concerned with issues in musicology. During the second and third years of the course (which form a single unit: there is no examination at the end of the second year) 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, and choral performance.

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 and two-manual harpsichord in chapel. The 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 (a Fellow in music and two College Lecturers), 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. Professor Rees’s main interests as scholar and performer are in Renaissance and Baroque music, and he directs the College Chapel Choir as well as the professional vocal ensemble Contrapunctus. Dr Broad specialises in various aspects of twentieth-century music and in analysis. Mr Wedler is an expert on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, and teaches music history within these periods, analysis, and musical aesthetics and philosophy.

Interviews

As at all colleges, candidates are required to submit two essays – at least one of which should normally be on music – and some examples of harmony and counterpoint. You can also send some examples of original composition. All work submitted should be teacher-marked work. Candidates who are called to interview will be asked to give a performance on their principal instrument or voice at the Faculty of Music. In the interviews at Queen’s, candidates will be asked to discuss a musical extract and a brief piece of writing about music, both of which will be given to candidates to look at before the relevant interview. The interviews will also include discussion of points relating to the written work submitted, and candidates’ musical studies, experience, and interests. We are looking for candidates with a good grasp of how music works, and an interest in thinking critically about music and how it relates to its context, e.g. historically.


Introduction

I’m a music analyst; my research interests encompass the mature chamber music of Edward Elgar (on which I wrote my PhD), late tonal music (particularly Wagner and Strauss), and early British dodecaphony. I am currently co-writing a book with Professor J. P. E. Harper-Scott, entitled Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music; it is due to be published in the RMA monograph series. I’m also a keen guitarist. I was awarded the guitar-departmental performance prize during my master’s studies at Trinity Laban, Conservatoire of Music and Dance. I have just completed the manuscript for my first monograph, Twelve-Tone British Solo Guitar Music and Julian Bream.

Teaching

I teach all the analysis modules one can take at Queen’s, but I also run tutorials on pop transcription and arrangement and Modernism in Vienna.

Publications

Articles

  • ‘Reginald Smith Brindle’s Concept of Tonal-Atonal Equilibrium in Theory and Practice’, Soundboard Scholar 7 (in press, December 2021).
  • ‘Tonal Dodecaphony and Sentential Form: Extracts from Humphrey Searle’s Symphony No. 2, Op. 33’, Music Theory & Analysis 8/2 (in press, October 2021).
  • ‘Structural Dissonance Reimagined: the Finale of Elgar’s Violin Sonata, Op. 82’, Music & Letters 102/2 (in press). (An advanced copy of the article is available here: https://academic.oup.com/ml/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ml/gcaa088/6047274?guestAccessKey=fccd5fbd-d5a3-4b29-8df4-eb06723cbd8b)
  • ‘“Octatonic” voice leading and diatonic function in the Allegro molto from Elgar’s String Quartet in E minor, op. 83’, Music Theory Online 26/1 (2020)  https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.1/mto.20.26.1.chandler.html
  • ‘Diatonic Illusions and Chromatic Waterwheels: Edward Elgar’s Concept of Tonality’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 15/1 (2020): 3-29
  • ‘A Diminished-Seventh Bassbrechung: Tonal Ambiguity and the Prolongation of Function in Edward Elgar’s String Quartet, 1st movement’, GAMUT: Online Journal of the Music-Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic 9/1 (2020): 1-29

Book chapters

  • ‘Tonality and (the) “Beyond”: Elgar’s Gerontius and Piacevole’ in Art, Music, and Mysticism in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Michelle Foot and Corrinne Chong (Routledge, under contract for August 2022: 7,500 words).


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 choral conducting.

Research

My research focuses on sacred music in Spain, Portugal, and England during the Renaissance. 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

  • 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

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