David Trippett

David Trippett is a University Lecturer in the Music Faculty, and a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College.

He is interested in elisions between sound and writing, the ways in which different technologies have influenced the recording of history, and the concomitant tension between sound as a physical object and a carrier of aesthetic ideas. His primary research focuses on nineteenth-century intellectual history, Richard Wagner, and the intersection of German aesthetic thinking with the growth of the natural sciences. Other interests include Franz Liszt and post-Classical Weimar; relations between new media, historical media, and modernism; and performance theory, including the grey area between improvisation and composition, projections of identity in performance, and theories of musical reproduction after Walter Benjamin.

In 2009 his research received the Alfred Einstein award of the American Musicological Society, and in 2012, the Donald Tovey Memorial Prize of the University of Oxford.

His publications—listed below—include editions and translations, as well as research and review articles. Following an edited translation of Carl Stumpf’s The Origins of Music (2012), his first monograph, Wagner’s Melodies, is due out early in 2013, and he is currently embarking on a new research project on music and materialism in the twentieth century.

Where time permits, he is also active as a collaborative pianist. After winning a DAAD music fellowship, he spent a year at Leipzig’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholody” and was a finalist in the John Lill Piano Competition. He has performed in America, Germany, Italy and the UK, including most recently as a Young-Artist at the Britten-Pears festival in Aldeburgh, and at the Solti Te Kanawa Accademia di Bel Canto in Castiglione della Pescaia.

Publications

Monographs:

• Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2013), in production

Other books:

• Editor and translator of Carl Stumpf, The Origins of Music (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 290pp

Journal editor:

• co-editor with Anne Shreffler of Musiktheorie 3 (2009), special edition “Rudolf Kolisch in Amerika – Aufsätze und Dokumente” 288pp

Journal articles:

• “‘Bayreuth in Miniature’: Wagner and the Melodramatic Voice,” Musical Quarterly 95 (2012): 71-138
• “Lohengrin, the Weimar Hoftheater, and the Politics of a Premiere,” Journal of the American Liszt Society (2011): 135-158
• “Wagner Studies and the ‘Parallactic Drift,’” Cambridge Opera Journal 22 (2011): 237-57
• “The Composer’s Rainbow: Rudolf Kolisch and the limits of Rationalization,” Musiktheorie 3 (2009): 228-37
• “Après une lecture de Liszt: Virtuosity and Werktreue in the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” 19th-Century Music 32 (2008): 52-93
• “Composing Time: Zeno’s Arrow, Hindemith’s Erinnerung, and Satie’s Instantanéisme,” Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 522-580

Book chapters:

• “Carl Stumpf: A Reluctant Revolutionary” in The Origins of Music, ed. and trans. David Trippett (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 17-30
• “Individuation as Worship: Wagner and Shakespeare” in Great Shakespeareans: Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, ed. Daniel Albright (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 135-57
• “Defending Wagner’s Italy” The Legacy of Richard Wagner, ed. Luca Sala (Turnhaut: Brepols, 2012), 363-98
• “Letters to a Young Composer about Wagner” introduction and translation of excerpts from Johann Christian Lobe’s “Briefe über Wagner an einen jungen Komponisten,” in Wagner and his World, ed. Thomas Grey (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009), 269-310
• “The Overture to Tannhäuser,” introduction, annotation, and edition of portions from Liszt’s essay “Lohengrin et Tannhäuser de Richard Wagner” in Wagner and his World, ed. Thomas Grey (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009), 251-68

Introductions & encyclopedia entries:

• Entries for The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013) on: Hans von Bülow, Marie d’Agoult, Edward Dannreuther, Marie Fürstin zu Hohenlohe, Improvisation, Franz Liszt, Melos, Piano Transcriptions, Carolyn von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Marie von Schleinitz, Agnes Street-Klindsworth, Karl Tausig, and Wendelin Weißheime
• Entries for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, on: Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Barzun, Hugues Panassié, and Andrew Porter
• Edition and introduction, “Liszt on Lohengrin (or: Wagner in absentia)” of Liszt’s 1851 essay about Lohengrin, The Wagner Journal 4/1-3 (2010): serialized over three issues

Book reviews:

• Review of Edward T. Cone, The Unpublished Essays of Edward T. Cone, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009) for Fontes Artis Musicae 57 (2010): 437-40
• Review of Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008) for Nineteenth-Century Music Review 7 (2010): 138-43
• Review of Franz Liszt and his World, ed. Gooley and Gibbs (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006) for Notes 63 (2007): 839-42

Other Writing:

• Notes for Decca Classics: Kasper Bech Holten’s production of Tannhäuser (2011)
• Guest editor of The Wagner Journal 5/1 (2011), 112pp
• Programme notes for the 2009 Bard Festival Wagner and his World entitled: “The Triumphant Revolutionary,” and for the 2006 Bard Festival Liszt and his World entitled “The Young Liszt: From Vienna to Paris” and “Late Liszt: Spirituality and Experimentation” subsequently published in the Journal of the American Liszt Society 57 (2006): 14-19, 60-65