Research in Historical Musicology

Historical musicology in Cambridge has a long and distinguished history. The graduate programme is one of the largest in the UK, and features among its PhD holders many of the leading figures in national and international musicology. In the last thirty years, for example, doctoral students now holding prestigious posts elsewhere include: Robin Stowell (1978), Edward Higginbottom (1979), Roy Howat (1979), Nicholas Cook (1983), Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (1983), David Nicholls (1985), Donald Neville (1988), Silvina Milstein (1988), Mervyn Cooke (1989), John Rink (1989), Owen Rees (1991), Daniel Chua (1992), Robert Samuels (1994), Rebecca Herrissone (1996), Julian Horton (1998), Daniel Grimley (1999), Anthony Gritten (1999), Martin Dixon (1999), Alexander Rehding (1999), Flora Dennis (2001), Ben Earle (2001), Stephen Rose (2001), Martin Iddon (2004), James Davies (2005), and Helen Deeming (2005).

Graduates studying historical musicology at Cambridge are enrolled either on the M Phil course, a one-year taught Masters' which involves both general and specialist seminars and a dissertation, or as PhD students, which usually involves three to four years of specialist study.

The Faculty, which has particular strengths in music before 1600 and in nineteenth-century music, has ten full-time staff (three Professors, two Readers, three Senior Lecturers and two Lecturers) actively engaged in historical musicology. Three of them are recipients of the Dent Medal, awarded annually by the Royal Musical Association in conjunction with the International Musicological Society, and all are internationally distinguished in their respective fields. The Faculty sponsors a large number of visiting lecturers, usually about ten to fifteen per year, most of them appearing in the Graduate Colloquium Series, which is organized by current graduate students and takes place each Wednesday during term time. Further distinguished visitors appear as the biennial Orr Lecturer (Jeremy Isaacs, Julian Rushton, M. Jacques Attali, Ian Kemp, Reinhard Strohm, Bernard Williams, Frank Kermode, Jonathan Harvey, Simon Morrison) and as the Wort Lecturer, who joins the Faculty for a fixed period to give four formal lectures and various seminars (recent Wort Lecturers include Leo Treitler, Carolyn Abbate, Kofi Agawu, Lydia Goehr and Gary Tomlinson).

For further details of Faculty research activities, see individual biographies at:
People