Faculty of Music

Matthew Pritchard

Jesus College
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Matthew Pritchard is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Music Faculty, and a College Research Associate at Jesus College, where he also completed his BA (2003) and MPhil (2004). After a year spent studying German language and literature in Göttingen and at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, he began a PhD on “Melody in late Beethoven” in 2005 at Royal Holloway, University of London, supervised by Nicholas Cook. This has led on to the present research project, mentored by Prof. Cook, entitled “The analysis of feeling: motive and metaphor in European music 1750-1950”. During 2009-10, Matthew also undertook a course of study at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal, in Rabindrasangit, the songs of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), and since then has been working on translating some of Tagore’s song texts and essays on music from the Bengali.

Matthew’s research interests centre on the cultural history and philosophy of music theory and aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the European field his research centres on the history of the “motive” in music, and the ways in which its changing theorizations from the mid-eighteenth century to Schenker, Schoenberg and beyond have been guided by different aesthetic principles and underlying social-cultural ideologies. In the field of Bengali music he is interested in Indian attitudes to notation, aesthetics and the social organization of music, as encapsulated particularly in Tagore’s work and the culture of Bengali art song.

Publications

Articles

  • “‘The moral background of the work of art’: ‘character’ in German musical aesthetics, 1780-1850”, in Eighteenth-Century Music 9:1 (2012)
  • “Who killed the concert? Heinrich Besseler and the inter-war politics of Gebrauchsmusik”, with accompanying translation of Heinrich Besseler, “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens [Fundamental issues of musical listening]” (1925), in twentieth-century music 8:1 (2012)
  • “‘A heap of broken images’? Reviving Austro-German debates over musical meaning, 1900-1936”, forthcoming in Journal of the Royal Musical Association (March 2013)

Reviews

  • Review of The Cultural Study of Music: a critical introduction, eds. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (New York and London: Routledge 2003), in Musicae Scientiae 11:1 (2007)
  • “Essay Review: Contemporary German Aesthetics”, discussion of Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken (Stuttgart: Reclam 6th edn. 2003 [1990]), Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2001), and Reinhard Knodt, Ästhetische Korrespondenzen: Denken im technischen Raum (Stuttgart: Reclam 1994), in Journal of Aesthetic Education 43:3 (2009)
  • “In the galant composer’s workshop”, review of Robert Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), in Early Music 37:4 (2009)
  • “Analysis and plain speaking”, review of Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu, eds., Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008), in Early Music 39:2 (2011)
  • Review of Scott Burnham, Sounding Values: Selected Essays (Farnham: Ashgate 2010), forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Music Review 9:1 (2012)