Historical and cultural musicologies
An exploration into the connections between music, history, and culture through themes of identity, technology, and power.
Historical and cultural musicologies
We understand research as something that requires more than one single methodological and critical viewpoint. As a result most of our research involves working across several different research themes in any particular project.
Our historical and cultural musicologies overlap with practice-based approaches, and are informed by considerations of place and identity, voice and vocality, and socially-engaged perspectives.
In terms of historical periods, research into the musical and social worlds of Tudor and early modern societies are typically interdisciplinary, operating in combination with the Medieval and Early Modern Studies research group.
The group crosses between Music, English, Digital Humanities and History, as well as with complementary researchers at Northumbria and Durham universities.
This results in a rich research environment for this historical period, and a network of cross-institutional doctoral supervision.
Popular musics of various kinds, from early modern domestic music making to Charlie xcx, have been part of Newcastle's research profile now for several decades
Our research in this area brings together considerations of:
- material, economic, and technological culture
- political critique
- psychoanalytical approaches
- memory studies
- ethnomusicological techniques
- intercultural power relations
- and sound studies
to explore the ways that popular musics have carried rich cultural meaning through the centuries.
Staff and doctoral students, while embracing English-language song, frequently look beyond a definition of popular music that can be implicitly Anglophone, and so we have expertise in:
- Hispanic and Lusophone cultures
- Mediterranean Jazz
- music of the Korean War and early Communist China
- South African vernacular musics
- Yiddish popular song
The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were a time of empire and a consolidation of colonialism, and many of our staff and doctoral students investigate the impacts this has on musical culture, whether that involves:
- transatlantic opera
- emergent nationalisms in central Europe and Scandinavia
- the historical and cultural roots of African diasporic musics in the Caribbean and the Americas
- music in the Nazi Holocaust
- the cultural politics of folk song collecting
Our research often explores the complex and difficult questions raised by a full historical understanding of 19th- and 20th-century musics.
The social, cultural, and technological changes of modernism, widely and inclusively defined, also feature strongly in our research culture. In this context we investigate historical curiosities such as the:
- renewed interest in Formenlehre as a hermeneutic tool for the modernist symphony
- global dissemination of particular musics
- impact of recording and broadcast technologies
- broad impact (and reaction against) Wagner
- globalising tendencies of recording media
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.