News

The Faculty of Music has been ranked #1 in the UK in the Times University Rankings.We are delighted at this recognition, and thank all those who have worked hard - students, professional staff, and research and teaching staff - for continually aiming for the highest standards.  

We are delighted to annouce that Prof. Peter McMurray has been awarded the Royal Musical Association's Edited Book Prize 2025for the volume he edited with Priyasha Mukhopadhyay: Acoustics of Empire (OUP 2024).Full details are given here.The citation reads: 'This highly polished collection significantly shapes its field not only through exploring gl…

A previously unknown song by the 17th Century composer Henry Purcell has been reconstructed by Dr Alan Howard, Associate Professor of Music at Selwyn College and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music.Alan is part of a team of musicologists working on two important Purcell scores recently uncovered in county records offices by the project Musi…

Dr Paul Wingfield, Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Trinity College, has helped to identify an 1894 German violin as having belonged to Einstein. Read his own account of how he came to do so on the Faculty's research blog.The instrument was auctioned by Dominic Winter Auctioneers in Cirencester on October the 8th.

The Faculty is delighted to announce the prize winners from this year’s Tripos Examinations in Music. We offer congratulations to all our graduands this year, and extend particular commendation to the prize winners below:Part IAPetya Ostrovsky (Donald Wort Prize) Part IBIsaac Chan (Donald Wort Prize) Part IISam Travis (Andrew Downes Composition Pri…

Congratulations to Peter Asimov, Associate Professor of Music and a Fellow at Magdalene College, who has won the Adele Katz Early Career Researcher Award, established by the Society for Music Analysis in 2023-24. This award honours early career researchers who have made significant contributions to music analysis.Dr Asimov is a specialist in the hi…

We are delighted to announce that Dr Peter Asimov, a specialist in the history of French musical modernism, has been awarded the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association for his article ‘The Melakartas and the ‘République Modale’: Naturalizing Indian Scales in French Musical Modernism’, published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Assoc…

We are delighted to announce that Prof. Bettina Varwig, a specialist on the cultural history of early modern music, the body and the emotions, and winner of the 2024 Otto Kinkeldey Award, has been named as the 2025 recipient of the Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal. The RMA has awarded this honour annually since 1961 to a scholar making an ‘ou…

Ruth Davis: The Legacy, Impact, and History-Making Role of the UK's First Named Ethnomusicology PostFriday 4 April | West Road Concert Hall | 5pm-6.30pmThis Friday, 4 April, the BFE conference will hold a plenary event celebrating our former colleague, the esteemed ethnomusicologist Ruth Davis, who held the first named ethnomusicology post in the U…

We are delighted to hear that our alumna, Laura van der Heijden (m. 2016), has just received the Royal Philharmonic Society's Instrumentalist Award. This recognizes the 'outstanding quality and scope' of her performances as a cellist within the UK. The judges' citation reads:'In everything she does, cellist Laura van der Heijden embodies excellence…

This year's Cambridge Festival programme has just launched, featuring several exciting events led by members of the Faculty of Music:14 March: Music, Healing and Human RightsAs part of a larger project, curated by Elizabeth Carmack, on the theme of music, healing and human rights, this performance by St Catharine’s College Choir, directed by Affili…

The Faculty of Music is delighted to announce that Roseanna Dunn is the winner of the 2024 Arthur Bliss Prize for Composition. The award is made for the best portfolio of compositions submitted in the MPhil in Music.

Music in Contemporary Societies professor Dr Alisha Lola Jones' research examining the intersection between gastromusicology and sexual performance anxiety among conservative worship leaders has been published in the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol10/iss1/2/"The Vagina Dentata: A Case for Unlocking M…

We are delighted to announce three Cambridge prizewinners at the Chicago Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society:Bettina Varwig, Professor of Music History: Otto Kinkeldey Award for an outstanding work in musicology, for her book Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (Chicago University Press, 2023). Jacob Olley, Resea…

The Faculty is pleased to announce that the Faculty Teaching Prize for 2023-24 has been jointly awarded to Professor Katharine Ellis and Dr Jacob Olley. We offer them our sincere congratulations.Nominations for the 2024-25 Prize will be requested from students in Easter Term.