Professor Nicholas Marston

Nicholas Marston is Professor of Music Theory and Analysis in the Faculty of Music; he is also Praelector 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 a contributor to Schenker Documents Online. I am a former Chairman of the Editorial Board of the journal Music Analysis (I now sit on the Advisory Panel) former and Editor-in-Chief of Beethoven Forum.