Colloquium - Dr Martin Ennis

University of Cambridge

'The stretchèd metre of an antique song': some thoughts on Brahms and metre

Martin Ennis is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Faculty of Music and Fellow and Director of Music at Girton College, Cambridge. He began his higher education as Organ Scholar of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and on graduating pursued further studies first at the Musikhochschule in Cologne and later back in Cambridge. From 1989-90 he was Director of Music at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and in 1990 he was appointed inaugural Pilkington Fellow at Girton College. He joined the permanent staff of the Cambridge Music Faculty in 1994. From 2002 to 2005 he served as Chairman of the Music Faculty.


Martin Ennis combines his university life with a busy career as a performer, specialising as a continuo player. A Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, he has been a prizewinner at several international competitions. In addition to his work as the principal keyboard player of the London Mozart Players he has performed with such groups as the Monteverdi Choir (for their 25th anniversary concert), the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Kölner Bach-Collegium, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, and the Orchestra of St Luke’s in New York. He has made many recordings, including a first concerto recording with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He has directed the Choir of Girton College for over fifteen years; they have toured throughout the world, and he has led them to competition successes in Japan and, more recently, Austria. In recent years he has been increasingly active as an orchestral conductor with engagements in South America and the Far East as well as throughout Europe.


Martin Ennis’s research interests centre on the analysis of music, particularly that of Brahms. He has also worked extensively on historicism in the music of the nineteenth century, and is currently researching a study on this subject. He teaches a wide range of subjects at undergraduate level from sixteenth-century counterpoint to music in Nazi Germany. Recent and current graduate students have worked on Brahms (notions of cyclicity and Brahms’s concept of the “Liederstrauss”; the vocal duets; reception history during the Third Reich), Schumann (formal problems in the Second Symphony; advanced harmonic syntax), Mendelssohn (historicism and the “anxiety of influence”), Wagner (Stabreim in the transition years between Lohengrin and Das Rheingold), Strauss (the symphonic poems with reference to the New German school), Mahler (the First Symphony and its lyric roots), Schubert (grotesque elements in the Lieder), Berwald (the symphony from a non-German perspective), Dvorak (the symphonic poems), and the symphony in nineteenth-century London.