Nicholas Marston

Nicholas Marston is University Reader in Music Theory and Analysis in the Faculty of Music; he is also a Fellow, and Director of Studies in Music, of King’s College. Prospective undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to contact him at any time.

I came up to Cambridge in 1977, as a Choral Exhibitioner at Corpus Christi College; prior to that I’d been educated at a grammar school in Penzance, Cornwall. On graduation, I began a Ph. D. dissertation on the sketches for Beethoven’s op. 109 piano sonata (a revised version was published as a book, in 1995). In 1984 I was awarded the Trevelyan Research Fellowship at Selwyn College; I resigned that fellowship in 1986 in order to accept one of the inaugural British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowships, my host institution being King’s College London. In 1989 I was appointed to my first full-time post, as University Lecturer in Music at the University of Exeter. I left Exeter for Bristol in 1994, but after one year I accepted a post at Oxford, where I was University Lecturer (subsequently Reader) in Music, Fellow of St Peter’s College, and College Lecturer at St Edmund Hall.

My return to Cambridge, and this time to King’s College, came in 2001. My research interests range across Beethoven manuscript studies; theory and analysis (especially Schenkerian analysis); Schumann (especially the Lieder, and later choral music); the history of the choral foundation at King’s College. I am collaborating with Ian Bent in an online edition of Schenker’s correspondence. I am currently Chairman of the Editorial Board of the journal Music Analysis, and Editor-in-Chief of Beethoven Forum.

My publications include:

The Beethoven Compendium (London, 1991) [co-author]
Schumann: Fantasie, op. 17 (Cambridge, 1992)
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E, op. 109 (Oxford, 1995)
‘”Wie aus der ferne”: Pastness and Presentness in the Lieder of Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann’, in Schubert durch die Brille (Tutzing, 1998)
‘Voicing Beethoven’s Distant Beloved’, in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton, 2000)
‘Schubert’s Homecoming’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 125 (2000)
‘Who’s Beethoven?’, Beethoven Forum, 11 (2004)
‘The Most Significant Musical Question of the Day: Schumann’s Music in Britain in the Later Nineteenth Century’, Robert und Clara Schumann und die nationalen Musikkulturen des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Matthias Wendt. Schumann Forschungen 9 (Mainz, 2005)
‘In the “twilight zone”: Beethoven’s unfinished Piano Trio in F minor’, forthcoming in Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2006)
Heinrich Schenker and Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata (Ashgate, forthcoming 2008)

M. Phil. and Ph. D. supervisees have in recent years explored the following areas:

• Notation in Beethoven’s keyboard music;
• Woman composers within the London Pianoforte School;
• Elgar and Heidegger: analysis of his ‘modernist’ music;
• Schubert, song, and German ‘nature’;
• Schubert and later nineteenth-century tonality;
• Mendelssohn and cyclical form;
• Bartok source studies;
• Analysis of orchestration in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century music.