Roles
Biography
I am Professor of Music History at the Faculty of Music and Fellow of Emmanuel College. Previously I was Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London, where I also took my undergraduate degree. I completed my doctoral studies at Harvard University in 2006, followed by a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and Girton College. I joined the Faculty at Cambridge in my current post in 2017.
My research focuses on music and cultural history in early modern Europe, in particular in the German-speaking lands. I am interested in musical affect and expression, in music's place in the history of the body, the senses and the emotions, as well as practices of musical listening and performance. I have also worked on issues of reception and historiography, in particular the reception of J. S. Bach’s music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I'm deeply invested in interdisciplinary dialogue of all stripes, enjoying exchange and collaboration with colleagues in history, philosophy, theology, sound studies, history of science and music psychology. I also hugely enjoy working with performers, using historical insights as a stimulus for creative transformation of these early modern musical repertories in performance today.
My first monograph, Histories of Heinrich Schütz, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2011. My second book, Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. I am editor of the volume Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021), and of Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story for the Neue Schütz Ausgabe (Bärenreiter, 2017). My work received the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association in 2013 and the William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society in 2016. I serve on the editorial boards of Eighteenth-Century Music, the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the American Bach Society.
Publications
Monographs
Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Edited Book
Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Critical Edition
Heinrich Schütz, Historia der Geburt Jesu Christi (Bärenreiter, 2017)
Articles and Book Chapters
‘Music in the Margin of Indifference’, in Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom, ed. Daniel Chua, Markus Rathey and Jeremy Begbie (Oxford University Press, 2021), 129-146
‘Embodied Invention: Bach at the Keyboard’, in Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (Oxford University Press, 2021), 115-140
‘Musical Expression: Lessons from the Eighteenth-Century?’, Eighteenth-Century Music 17/1 (2020), 53-72
‘Distributed Listening: Aural Encounters with J. S. Bach’s Sacred Cantatas’, BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute 51/2 (2020), 210-240
‘Music in the Thirty Years War: Towards an Emotional History of Listening’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 26/1 (2020), https://sscm-jscm.org/jscm-issues/volume-26-no-1/varwig-emotional-listen...
'Heartfelt Musicking: The Physiology of a Bach Cantata', representations 143 (2018), 36-62
‘Early Modern Voices’, in The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, ed. Emily Dolan and Alexander Rehding (Oxford University Press, 2019)
‘Musical Expression: Lessons from the Eighteenth Century?’, Eighteenth-Century Music, forthcoming
‘Beware the Lamb: Staging Bach’s Passions’, Twentieth-Century Music 11 (2014), 245-274
‘Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach’, The Journal of Musicology 29 (2012), 154-190
'Death and Life in Bach’s Cantata “Ich habe genung” (BWV 82)’, The Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135 (2010), 315-356
'"Mutato semper habitu”: Heinrich Schütz and the Culture of Rhetoric’, Music & Letters 90 (2009), 215-239
‘“New Music” in the Seventeenth Century’, in Gewinn und Verlust in der Musikgeschichte, ed. Andreas Haug and Andreas Dorschel (Universal, 2008), 212-231
‘One More Time: Bach and Seventeenth-Century Traditions of Rhetoric’, Eighteenth-Century Music 5 (2008), 179-208
