Professor David Trippett

I am a musicologist and cultural historian. Before coming to Cambridge, I taught at the Universities of Bristol, King’s College London and Cambridge itself.

My research focuses on nineteenth-century intellectual history, Richard Wagner, and the philosophy of technology. Other interests include Franz Liszt and post-Classical Weimar, as well as posthumanism and musical creativity in the digital age. I welcome applications from potential PhD students in these areas.

Following an edited translation of Carl Stumpf’s The Origins of Music (OUP 2012), my first monograph, Wagner’s Melodies (CUP 2013), examines the cultural and scientific history of melodic theory in relation to Wagner's writings and music. Other publications include editions and translations, as well as research and review articles, and some media work.

In my research and teaching, I approach music and its cultures in the widest interdisciplinary sense, incorporating perspectives of cultural and intellectual history, music theory and the history of science, and as well as mediality and the philosophy of technology. 

Between 2015-21, I was Principal Investigator for an ERC Starting Grant entitled 'Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century.' This examined how a scientific-materialist conception of sound was formed alongside a dominant culture of romantic idealism. It hosted four postdoctoral scholars--Edward Gillin, Melle Kromhaut, Melissa van Drie and Stephanie Probst--held three conferences, and contributed a set of publications (6 books, 23 chapters, 20 articles et al.) to the ongoing discourse on material culture within the humanities.

Alongside this, I completed a critical edition and an orchestrated performing edition of Franz Liszt's Italian opera, Sardanapalo. This received its world premiere in August 2018, and a recording was released in 2019 to critical acclaim. The first staging will take place at the Hungarian State Opera in March 2027. 

Major prizes for research include the Lewis Lockwood Award and the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society, the Bruno Nettl Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Donald Tovey Memorial Prize of the University of Oxford, a Deems Taylor Award of the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.

As a pianist, I trained at Chetham's School of Music and the Mendelssohn Musikhochschule in Leipzig, and have performed in Germany, Italy, the UK, mainland China and on both coasts of the US. Since 2024, I have recorded several albums, including three directing the Philharmonia Orchestra.