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Job title:

Professor of the Analysis and Philosophy of Music

Role:

PGR Director; MMus Programme Director

Office:

Alison House, Room 3.02

Biography

Benedict is Professor of the Analysis and Philosophy of Music at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh.  He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin in 2019–20, having also held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is the recipient of the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association.  Benedict is currently co-editor of Music & Letters, series editor for Cambridge University Press's Music in Context series, associate editor of 19th-Century Music, and serves on the editorial boards of Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, and Romance, Revolution & Reform. He is always happy to hear from scholars interested in publishing in Music in Context.

Research interests

  • Late 18th- to early 20th-Century music
  • Temporality and subjectivity
  • Music theory and analysis (esp. Formenlehre and late-Romantic harmony)
  • Mendelssohn and Hensel
  • Philosophy and aesthetics

Teaching

Course Organiser for:

  • Set Works
  • Music and Ideas from Romanticism to the Late Twentieth Century
  • Music Analysis 1
  • Music Analysis 2
  • Music Analysis 3
  • Beethoven: Man, Music, Myth
  • Mendelssohn and the Making of 19th-Century Musical Culture 
  • Harmony 3
  • MMus: Research Methods
  • MMus: Music, Philosophy and Politics 

Dissertation supervisor for a number of undergraduate, Master's, and PhD students

Research

Benedict's research interests concentrate historically on Classical-Romantic music from Haydn to the mid-twentieth century, though he has published more broadly on music stretching from the early eighteenth-century to the present, and his background specialisation in German and British music is counterbalanced by a sympathy for a far wider range of European repertory and moves beyond ready-made distinctions between serious, light, and popular musics. Although ranging from theoretical accounts of form and harmony to more philosophical studies of time and subjectivity, generally his work seeks to meld close analytical engagement with music and its experience with wider aesthetic questions of meaning.

He is the author of seven monographs: the first, 'Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form', published by Cambridge University Press in 2011, offers the first substantial account of the development of cyclic form in the nineteenth century. The second, 'The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era', is an analytical and philosophical study of the relation between music and time from Beethoven and Schubert to Franck and Elgar, published by Oxford University Press. His RMA Monograph, 'Towards a Harmonic Grammar of Grieg’s Late Piano Music: Nature and Nationalism' explored the harmonic usage of late 19th-century composers outside or on the periphery of the Austro-German tradition, extending recent work in neo-Riemannian theory and the geometries of tonality into wider cultural issues pertaining to nationalist discourses and historiography. 'Arthur Sullivan: A Musical Reappraisal', a pioneering study of the music of the ever-popular but long critically neglected English composer, appeared in 2017 in Routledge’s Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series.  'Music and Subjectivity, and Schumann' (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers a long-overdue critical examination of the notion of musical subjectivity, seeking to provide a critical refinement of this concept and to elucidate both its importance and limits.  His last book was on Fanny Hensel's String Quartet for the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series (the first such volume dedicated to a work by a woman), while his study of Coleridge-Taylor's 'Hiawatha' Trilogy is forthcoming in 2025 from Oxford Keynotes.

He has edited several further books, including ‘Rethinking Mendelssohn’ (Oxford, 2020), ‘The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism’ (2021), and ‘Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context’ (with Thomas Schmidt; Cambridge, forthcoming 2025).  In addition, he has published on a broad range of music from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in leading journals such as 19th-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Analysis, Journal of Music Theory, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Music.

PhD Supervision Topics

  • Music Analysis and Theory
  • 19th-Century Music, with a special emphasis on Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann; more broadly, Western music from Haydn to the Second Viennese School (especially German and British music)
  • Musical Temporality

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