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Faculty of Music

 

Roles

Professor of Music History
Director of Studies, Emmanuel College
Takes PhD students
Musical cultures in early modern Europe; history of the body, the emotions and the senses; history of science; affect; listening; performance; liveness; Johann Sebastian Bach; reception history

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 is grounded in my fascination with the powers of music(king) to affect and transform its participants. I have pursued this fascination in different guises across the history of European early modernity and beyond, exploring issues of musical affect and expression; the history of the body, the senses and the emotions; and practices of musical listening and performance. The music of J. S. Bach has formed a recurring point of reference in these endeavours. I have also worked on issues of reception and historiography, in particular Bach reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am 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 am also passionate about working with performers, using historical insights as a stimulus for creative transformation of these early modern repertories in performance today. 

I am the author of two monographs: Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge, 2011) and Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (Chicago, 2023), which received the 2024 Otto Kinkeldey Award  of the American Musicological Society. I am editor of Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021), and of Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story and Zwölf Geistliche Gesänge for the Neue Schütz Ausgabe (Bärenreiter). 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

Key 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)

Heinrich Schütz, Zwölf Geistliche Gesänge (Bärenreiter, forthcoming 2025)

 

Articles and Book Chapters

'Bach's Hand(s)', Bach: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute 55 (2024), 136-167

‘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)

‘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