Music staff profiles

Our staff teach composition, performance, and diverse musicological approaches in classical, popular, folk, jazz, contemporary, and world musics, exploring the connections between genres as well as their differences.

This makes for a rich and varied curriculum where students are supported by world experts in their field.

Through strong local, national, and international links, our work is deeply connected with the music industry, governmental arts policy, education, social and cultural mobility, health and wellbeing, and social and environmental justice.

Phil Begg

Lecturer in Composition

My research explores the aesthetic and affective mechanics of sound recording/music production and the artistic agency of the producer (and, particularly, the composer-producer) through multi-disciplinary, contextually-situated professional practice.

I am particularly interested in the academic study of record production and cinema sound design.

I remain active as a practicing composer, producer and sound designer. In addition to my solo work with electric guitar and modular synthesizer, I lead the experimental big-band project Midnight Doctors, which has been featured several times on BBC Radio 6 Music. I have worked on internationally recognised collaborative film and video art projects as sound designer and composer, and have significant professional experience as a producer for artists including Richard Dawson, Rhodri Davies, John Butcher and Cath & Phil Tyler.

Adam Behr

Reader in Music, Politics and Society

I teach and research the intersections between the creative industries, cultural policy, music, and politics. I'm also interested in the sociology and history of popular music and their relationship to the politics of popular culture.

Following a PhD on the historical context and social dynamics of rock bands at the University of Stirling, I have researched and published on cultural policy, music and politics, music and election campaigns, the music industries, and the popular music of the mid-twentieth to twenty first centuries.

In addition to academic writing, I've written extensively for the web, as an editor and contributor to the Live Music Exchange site, for The Conversation and elsewhere.

Charlotte Bentley

Lecturer in Music

My research focuses on operatic mobility in the nineteenth century, using the translation of opera into non-European environments as a way of examining questions of international cultural transfer in the period more broadly.

I have explored the New Orleans's place within growing global operatic systems, arguing for the centrality of human agency to the long-term development of transatlantic networks of production, as well as the role of material culture in promoting an increasingly international operatic discourse. At the same time, I have sought to understand the more distinctively local aspects of the city’s operatic life, in terms of the theatre-going experience and the adaptation/reception of particular works.

My other research interests include Jules Massenet, operatic realism, and the influence of media technologies on the production and reception of opera in the late nineteenth century. 

Ian Biddle

Professor of Music History

I'm a cultural theorist and musicologist, working on a range of topics in music- and sound-related areas, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My work ranges from the cultural history of music and masculinity, theorising music's intervention in communities and subjectivities, sound, soundscapes and urban experience, and the politics of noise.

I'm interested in memory studies, sound studies, Italian workerist and autonomist theory, psychoanalysis and theoretical approaches to 'affective' states. I'm the co-founder and co-ordinating editor (with Richard Middleton) of the journal Radical Musicology. 

Rob Blazey

Music Studio Technician

I am a musician, artist and researcher based in Newcastle upon Tyne. My creative practice incorporates studio-based composition, hardware-based beat making, instrument design, performance, sound-art and sculpture.

My PhD research explores the practices of visual collage-artists (particularly Eduardo Paolozzi) as an analytic key to interrogating concerns of heterogeneous materiality and research on making practices across contemporary arts and humanities.

I have a keen interest in art and music and I am passionate about combining these interests with interactive electronics, traditional recording and compositional techniques and open-source technology.

Olivia Cameron

Performance Coordinator

I deal with all aspects of performance activities for the BA Degree programmes and performance students on the PG Degree programme. From setting up workshops, student concerts, timetabling lessons and recitals, coordinating projects and events, and administering large scale ensembles, including our Symphony Orchestra.

I am the main contact for our instrumental and vocal tutors, processing their payments, updating contracts etc. I also programme music for University Visit Days, run the annual Early Music @ Newcastle festival, and run the Thursday Lunchtime Concert Series, LIVE in the King's Hall.

Outside work, I manage and play in a string quartet, The Armstrong Quartet.

Steph Carter

Research Associate: Music, Heritage, Place

My research focuses on musical culture in early modern England. My published work includes articles on music ownership and circulation, the role of the publisher as music editor, and the sale of printed music outside London.

I have worked on the music print trade, networks and recreational music-making in Cambridge and Newcastle upon Tyne. I co-edited, with Kirsten Gibson and Roz Southey, Music in North-East England, 1500-1800 (Boydell, 2020) and, with Simon D.I. Fleming, The Music Trade in Regional Britain, 1650-1800 (Boydell, 2025).

My current work continues to focus on printed music books in early modern England, placing them within the wider context of the full range of activities that comprise the commercial music trade.

I am researching the movement of musical goods via the domestic coastal trade (thanks to funding from the Bibliographical Society) and evidence of music-making activities in the Duke of Northumberland’s archives at Alnwick Castle (thanks to funding from the Music & Letters Trust and the Bibliographical Society) and music activities at late 17th-century Carlisle Cathedral.

Nanette De Jong

Professor of Socially Engaged Ethnomusicology

My work has focussed primarily on Caribbean music, Black American jazz, and African-diasporic identity. 

I continue to publish in these areas (most recently as editor of the Cambridge Companion of Caribbean Music); however, after receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to South Africa (in 2006), my research expanded to also include Southern Africa. 

Given that region’s high rate of HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence (GBV), my work expressly turned towards matters of health, gender inequality, and music-based advocacy, with my most recent research divided between: (1) social-engagement pursuits, where I act as an ethnomusicologist-consultant for various communities, NGOs, and local organisations in Southern Africa; and (2) scholarly pursuits, where my more recent publications reflect this social-engagement work and is often written in collaboration with members of those communities. 

Through the years, I have collaborated with over 180 NGOs (non-government organisations), NPOs (non-profit organisations), and government offices. Together, we have implemented dozens of arts-based interventions, strengthened policy frameworks around health and gender equality, and organised training programmes to prepare women and youths for employment in the cultural sector. 

Eric Doughney

Lecturer in Music

I'm a musicologist and cultural theorist. A graduate in Theatre Design from the Central School of Art and Design (now Central St. Martins), London, I received my MLitt and PhD in Music from Newcastle University.

I've designed for theatre (drama, contemporary dance, ballet, and opera) and, as both a staff member of the BBC Design Group and as a freelancer, for film and television, specialising in music and arts productions.

Research interests include the musical and prose works of Richard Wagner; Wagnerism; The Bayreuth Festival as Index of Germany's Now; nationalism in music; music broadcasting, and the interrelation of politics, policies, and socio-cultural trends in the broadcasting of Western Art Music within the UK.

William Edmondes

Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Performance

William Thomas Gustav Edmondes is the full 'real' name of the artist and performer variously known as Gwilly Edmondez, Gustav Thomas, Copydex, Virginia Pipe and more. As a composer-performer my primary materials are voice, recorded media, sampling & sequencing; I also work with 8-bit Techno (Gameboy with Nanoloop),online video and drawing; my primary aesthetic is Wild Pop. 

I'm one half of the duo YEAH YOU with Elvin Brandhi; and publish (and posts on his Claws & Tongues page) extra-academic critical musicology and other writings as Gustav Thomas, my middle names and the first names of my grandfathers, which also indicates his background as half-Welsh, half-Slovene.

I teach Contemporary Music Practice at all three stages alongside historical-cultural musicology options on Hip Hop, Jazz, Fringe Cultures and Underground/Experimental Popular Music.

Richard Elliott

Senior Lecturer in Music

I'm a cultural musicologist with a particular interest in popular musics of the world.

My research interests are wide but mostly connect to ways in which music reflects and produces time, space and memorable objects. My early work explored the roles played by loss, memory, nostalgia and revolution in popular music and was heavily influenced by theories of place and spatiality. 

Another ongoing theme in my work is the various ways in which music creates or evokes ‘memory places’ that take on significance for individuals and communities.

Nancy Kerr Elliott

Lecturer in Folk and Traditional Music

I'm a folk educator with over 25 years’ teaching experience in both formal and informal education settings. I've led workshops and choirs and taught 1:1 at festivals, residential courses, schools and universities in the UK, Australia, Canada, Europe and Asia.

My music psychotherapy background informs my practice as a facilitator of client-led music-making throughout the lifespan.

Subject areas include:

• Creative Practice Research
• Traditions of these Islands
• Folk Ensemble
• Applied Songwriting & Composition (Folk & Modal)
• Folk Music, Gender & Identity

Paul Fleet

Professor of Authentic Music Theory

I welcome PhD Applications in the areas of:

• Authentic Music Theory
• Music Analysis
• Metatonality: Music that is both with and after tonality
• The music and aesthetics of Ferruccio Busoni
• Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness
• Embodied Learning
• Popular Music Education
• Learning and Teaching

Kirsten Gibson

Head of the School of Arts and Cultures / Professor of Early Modern Music and Culture

My current research focusses on music books in early modern and Georgian England - print and manuscript - but shifts the emphasis from the production of books and authorship towards a history of reading and recreational music making.

My research traces the sale, circulation and ownership of music books from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and seeks to rethink the social and geographical reach of literate recreational music making.

It explores anew well-known socially elite collectors and contexts by placing them in a broader nexus of musical activity, music book ownership and use. It takes account of a broad cast of historical actors and a wide range of spaces that music books inhabited and in which they were realised in sound through acts of ‘reading’ as musical performance.

My research explores the social functions of music books for a variety of amateur musicians who fashioned social identities through the acquisition of musical skills and literacies (textual, notation, tablature), engagement in recreational music making, and ownership, compilation or creation of music books that supported and signalled such activity.

Anna Heslop

School Technician

My current research project 'To the Heart that Beats and the Feet that Know' delves into how creative practitioners study place and the nature of the artistic outcome.

This research will culminate in the creation of an installation which presents visual artworks in parallel with an acousmatic soundwork to create a complete whole, drawing on historical antecedents while demonstrating a personal approach to the artist’s practice.

Unlike approaches which favour one medium over another, this work will open a dialogue between the mediums which are connected through my interdisciplinary methodology, whereby both visual and sonic approaches inform one another.

In contrast to site-specific research which places primary importance on a geographic location, this project seeks to locate the essence of place by posing itself as the site.

This allows place to come about through the act of doing and highlights the interconnected nature of the senses which is the reality of embodied place experience and is what forms the conceptual underpinning of this work.

Bennett Hogg

Senior Lecturer

Current Work

• composing music for release with Arts Council of England funded book with Mike Collier, Geoff Sample, and Alex Charrington - also writing a chapter for this book.
• commission for new work for Icelandic early music group Nordic Affect.
• commission for ten-string guitar piece for CD release in 2019 by Stefan Ostersjo.
• co-investigator on "Bee-ing Human", Leverhulme Trust three-year funded interdisciplinary research project on Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie, a 17th-century book on bees and beekeeping, and co-investigator (Newcastle University lead) on Sonic Intangibles, a twi-year joint UKRI-funded interdisciplinary project exploring data sonification.
• Co-editor of special issue of Seismograf, a Danish music and sound art journal specialising in the innovatory "audio paper" format.
• Director of Landscape Quartet - formerly an AHRC-funded environmental sound art project.
• Curator and producer of sound art and music for Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Gardens, Stamfordham, Northumberland.
• co-editing with Matthew Sansom a new edited issue of Contemporary Music Review - "Music, Sound, and Landscape" - now in press

Fred Hollingsworth

Technical Expert & Team Leader: Music

My interests lie in music production pedagogy, adaptive sonic interaction, recording technology and the influence of technology on music production aesthetics.

I'm currently researching new ways of classifying and communicating timbral ideas in professional and educational settings. My previous work includes designing and prototyping adaptive binaural spatialisation systems using optical head tracking.

Oskar Cox Jensen

UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in Music

My research generally relates to one or both of a) song, and b) street culture, while my empirical focus tends to be on British history – though always within a global context.

The earliest key strand of my research is probably song in relation to the intersection of culture and politics, national identity, radicalism and loyalism. This is manifest most obviously in: my first book, Napoleon and British Song; a special issue of Journal of British Studies I co-edited with David Kennerley on Music and Politics in Britain; and the project Our Subversive Voice, based at UEA, examining five centuries of English protest song.

The second key theme is street culture, especially that of London. See my second monograph The Ballad-Singer and my first trade book, Vagabonds, which seeks to use human interest and bottom-up biography as a methodology. Theatrical culture is also central to my research. See, for example, the volume Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture, co-edited with David Kennerley and Ian Newman.

I'm an active member of a number of research networks, such as Newcastle's own Performance Research Network, the Nineteenth-Century Song Club, and the Romantic National Song Network.

Performance and public engagement are key aspects of my research, both in practice-as-research and as outputs. I'm trying to never write or talk about a song without first having at least tried to sing it 

Joe Lockwood

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow

I am a music historian with research interests in the eighteenth century and the broader early modern period. I am especially interested in the relationship between music, politics, society, religion and culture during this period.

My current work explores the changing ways Handel's music was performed and thought about in the years after his death beyond Britain, in locations including Italy, the Caribbean, Austria and India. As well as performances, criticism, arrangements and translations of Handelian material, I also consider other composers' creative responses to Handel's music.

Catriona Macdonald

Senior Lecturer

Catriona Macdonald is a proud bearer of one of the world's great fiddle traditions, that of the Shetland Isles. A pupil of the late Dr Tom Anderson MBE, Catriona at once embodies the strength and spirit of her heritage with the freshness and diversity of a thoroughly modern performer. Her superb playing and great charisma have established her a worldwide reputation.

Rob Mackay

Senior Lecturer in Composition

My main area of research is in electroacoustic composition and sound art. Recent projects have moved towards a more cross-disciplinary approach, including theatre, text in performance, audiovisual installation work, acoustic ecology, and human-computer interaction.

My work has gained international recognition in the form of prizes and honours, and my pieces are performed regularly worldwide (including several performances on BBC Radio 3).

Jane Nolan

Senior Lecturer in Music Enterprise

My research interests include the realisation of value and meaning-making through enterprise and entrepreneurial approaches in the Arts, Humanities and cultural sector including the problematic issues of using the language and concepts of business.

These interests led to the AHRC funded project (in collaboration with Dr Dawn Weatherston) “Speaking the same language” and the concept of BaFL, Business as a Foreign Language, which involved PGRs from Music and English from Newcastle, Durham and Queen’s Belfast Universities in co-designing a workshop which explored the creation and realisation of value from their creativity, and which was congruent with their needs and expectations.

I am also interested in experiential learning and communities of practice.

Matthew Ord

Lecturer

My research applies a cultural-historical approach to the intersection of ideology and musical practice in British folk and popular music. In 2017 I completed my AHRC-funded PhD thesis which combined ethnographic and desk-based research to explore the cultural significance of sound recording in the British post-war folk revival.

I am interested in the role of recording and other media technologies in folk music cultures, and have published chapters on the role of recording within the British folk-rock movement, and on the media activism of the songwriter Ewan MacColl.

In December 2017 I was appointed postdoctoral fellow on an AHRC Creative Engagement project on the development of music tourism in Scotland. I am currently preparing articles on contemporary English folk field recordings, and on theories of cultural transmission in folk music historiography. In addition to my research activities, I remain an active musician with significant professional experience as a singer and guitarist in a range of folk and popular styles.

Julia Partington

Senior Lecturer

My research interests include the potential benefits of music education in early childhood as a means to address disadvantage and promote the wellbeing of children and families in challenging circumstances.

My doctoral thesis centred on collaborative approaches for teachers and visiting musicians working in primary music classrooms that aim to empower primary class teachers in terms of their own musical confidence and skills.

Goffredo Plastino

Reader in Musicology

My research focuses on popular music, jazz studies, Mediterranean music, organology and music iconography. My latest book, Rumore rosso [Red noise], is a monograph on Patti Smith's 1979 Italian concerts and their political and cultural context. My forthcoming monograph on photographic portraits of Neapolitan Song performers in early 20th century Europe will be published in 2025.

Meng Ren

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

I am currently working on a project about the Chinese political culture during the early days of the People’s Republic of China, outlining how the performing arts supported nation-building and societal reform in the early 1950s.

I have conducted research fieldwork in China, Taiwan, the United States, and Colombia. I also worked as a research assistant for Art History and Archeology projects on Eurasian metal culture. 

My other research interests include orientalism, intangible cultural heritage (ICH), cosmopolitanism, sound and human emotion, music education, music and memory, as well as performance and conflict.

Mariam Rezaei

Senior Lecturer in Music Technology and Composition

My professional expertise and innovation informs my university teaching. The most clear example of this has been my delivery of an innovative DJ Skills and Turntablism undergraduate course, MUS2016.  Unique in its perspective, the hybrid course brings together performance skills in vinyl and digital DJing skills with creative composition.  

Most DJ courses offered are limited to teaching only DJing beatmatching with digital kit or CDJs. Reflective of my personal research achievements, this unique course is world-leading in innovative turntable composition pedagogy. This teaching has also informed my teaching on Composing with Technologies MUS2048, where turntable composition was included with the module when MUS2016 was not able to be delivered in 2021-22 academic year. 

My teaching is informed by my professional practice in free music and experimental new music aesthetics. Co-leading MUS2071 Jazz Today: Tomorrow Is The Question, and MUS2048 Free Music Practice includes my research, interviews and writing for Wire Magazine, my upcoming book and professional experiences inform the innovative pedagogy of these two new music courses.  

Christopher Tarrant

Senior Lecturer in Music Analysis

I am interested in music analysis of the period 1750–1930, particularly the music of Schubert, which was the subject of my doctoral thesis.

I also research the resurgence of the symphony in early-twentieth-century Scandinavia, with a particular focus on the music of Carl Nielsen. My analytical methods engage the New Formenlehre and schema theory.

I am also interested in ideology criticism as explored by psychoanalytic writers such as Freud, Lacan, and Žižek. I am President of the Society for Music Analysis and I sit on the editorial boards of Music Analysis and Carl Nielsen Studies. 

Magnus Williamson

Professor of Early Music

Since the 1990s I have focused on musical sources and contexts of the late Middle Ages, mainly in Britain, but more recently in France as well. I have several on-going research projects on the soundscape of the pre-Reformation parish, the printing of music books (particularly the often neglected but very significant corpus of printed chant books), and the Chapel Royal under the Tudors.

I have been Principal Investigator on various RCUK-funded projects, including Tudor Partbooks: The manuscript legacies of John Sadler, John Baldwin and their antecedents (Co-I: Dr Julia Craig-McFeely of Oxford University and DIAMM) (AHRC, 2014-17). I was for some years General Editor of the British Academy series, Early English Church Music (2008-2021) and am now its Chairman.

Larry Zazzo

Senior Lecturer in Music

I joined Newcastle University in 2017 and continue to perform in concert halls and opera houses throughout the world. I have made over 25 recordings of rarely-performed Baroque vocal masterpieces as well as premiering new works by Thomas Adès, Jonathan Dove, Missy Mazzoli, Iain Bell, Rolf Riehm, and Geoff Page. 

In addition to my ongoing research into Baroque opera and oratorio, performer wellbeing, historical performance practice, and opera libretto authorship recognition, my  recent world-premiere recordings include Jonathan Dove's dramatic cantata for countertenor, Hojoki, with the BBC Philharmonic (Orchid Classics), and Baroque Gender Stories, a collaboration with mezzo soprano Vivica Genaux and Lautten Compagney Berlin exploring disguise and gender ambiguity in late Baroque opera (Sony Classics). 

I frequently presents workshops and masterclasses around the world (working recently with young singers at the Barock Vokal Akademie Mainz, the Utrecht Conservatoire and Capetown University's opera studio), and have been a jury member for the Cesti Voice Competition in Innsbruck as well as a jury chair for the London Handel Singing Competition. I regularly give interviews in both UK and European media, such as Radio 3's The Listening Service and In Tune as well as Dutch and Croatian classical radio programmes focusing on his creative practice and musicological research.

At Newcastle, in addition to my roles as Head of Performance and Senior Tutor, I regularly lead a group of Music students in a year-long module, Performing Early Opera, conducting and directing fully-staged, historically-informed performances of Baroque dramatic works, including Handel's Acis and Galatea and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Fairy Queen at the Tyne Theatre and Opera House and at Seaton Delaval Hall.