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School of Music

Staff Profile of Dr Barbara Eichner

Name:

Dr Barbara Eichner

Position:

Honrary Research Fellow, CREaM

Email:

Location:

Phone:

01248 382181

Background

Barbara Eichner was born in Dinkelsbühl (Germany) and grew up in nearby Ansbach where she attended grammar school. She studied Musicology, Modern German Literature and Scandinavian Studies at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität Munich and, during an exchange year, Music at the University of Southampton, graduating in 2001 (Magister Artium) with a dissertation on the life and works of the composer Johann Rupprecht Dürrner. She did her doctorate at the University of Oxford, Jesus College, and received the DPhil in 2006 for a thesis entitled “Was ist deutsch?” Musical Solutions to Problems of National Identity (1848-c.1900). After teaching at Magdalen College and St Peter’s College, Oxford, she took up a lecturership in historical musicology at Goldsmiths, University of London, in September 2007. Since June 2007 she has been affiliated to Bangor University as an Honorary Research Fellow.

Responsibilities

Honorary Research Fellow; member of the research group Women and the Sacred within the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS), and member of the Centre for Research in Early Music (CREaM) at Bangor University.

Research interests

Barbara Eichner’s research interests broadly fall into two areas. Her thesis explored the role music played in the construction of a German national identity during the later nineteenth century, focusing on compositions that bring to life events from a glorified (and largely fictitious) national past. This also includes, but is not limited to, the works of Richard Wagner and their reception in Germany and Great Britain.

The second main area lies within the realm of women and gender studies. Her latest research project explores music making as a gendered practice in Southern German monasteries and nunneries during the late medieval and early modern era.  This study will afford a new perspective into the role of music in daily observances and special rituals, its relationship to education, spirituality and economics, and the introduction of vernacular song and polyphony to the cloister.

Main publications

Articles

  • ‘“Die Fahne ist des Sängers Braut”. Bilder von Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit in der bürgerlichen Männerchorbewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Geschlechterpolarisierungen in der Musik des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Freia Hoffmann, Rebecca Grotjahn (Herbolzheim: Centaurus, 2002), 31-49.
  • ‘Singing the Songs of Scotland: the German Musician Johann Rupprecht Dürrner and Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh’, in Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies 3, ed. Peter Horton, Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 171-191.
  • ‘“Da der Musikzustand in Ansbach gerade wieder ein bißchen im Steigen ist“: Johann Rupprecht Dürrner und das Ansbacher Musikleben 1831 bis 1844’, Musik in Bayern 65/66 (2003), 33-60.
  •  ‘Gottlieb Freiherr von Tuchers Kirchengesänge der berühmtesten älteren italiänischen Meister  (1827/28) und die Wiederentdeckung der Alten Musik’, Musicologica austriaca 23 (2004), 57-80.
  • ‘In träumerischer Entrückung auf pfadlosen Wegen: Verwandlungsmusiken in Der Ring des Nibelungen und Parsifal’, in Studien zur Wertungsforschung 48, ed. Andreas Dorschel (Vienna, London, New York 2007).
  • ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples: Julius Cyriax’s Friendship with Wagner and the Early Years of the London Wagner Society’, together with Guy Houghton, The Wagner Journal i/2 (July 2007).
  • ‘Vier Hochzeiten oder ein Todesfall: Die Inszenierung des Kudrun-Epos als Nationaloper’, in Oper und Politik. Hochkultur und Macht im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Sven Oliver Müller, Jutta Toelle (Vienna & Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007) (= Die Gesellschaft der Oper. Die Musikkultur europäischer Metropolen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert 2).
  • ‘Gender und nationale Identität in der bürgerlichen Männerchorbewegung des 19.  Jahrhunderts’, in Kompendium Musik und Gender, ed. Rebecca Grotjahn and Sabine Vogt (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag 2008) (forthcoming).
  • Schwert und Schild und Dolch und Gift: Germanische Heldin und welsche Primadonna’, in Diva – Die Inszenierung der übermenschlichen Frau, ed. Rebecca Grotjahn, Dörte Schmidt, Thomas Seedorf (Schliengen: Argos, 2008) (forthcoming).

Articles in Encyclopedias

  • ‘Dürrner, Johannes (Rupprecht)’, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Zweite, neubearbeitete Auflage, ed. Ludwig Finscher (Kassel, Basel et al.: Bärenreiter, 2001) Personenteil vol. 5, cols 1700-1702.
  • ‘Dürrner, Johann(es) Rupprecht’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Second Edition, ed. Stanley Sadie (London et al.: Macmillan, 2001) vol. 7, 757.
  • ‘Zenger, Max’, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Zweite, neubearbeitete Auflage, ed. Ludwig Finscher (Kassel, Basel et al., 2007), Personenteil vol. 17, cols. 1432-1433.

Reviews

  • Eva Rieger, Minna und Richard Wagner: Stationen einer Liebe (Düsseldorf & Zürich: Artemis & Winkler, 2003), published in Wagner 25/1 (2004), 48-52.
  • Roger Hillman, Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology (Bloomington/Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005), for H-German net, published on 31 August 2006.
  • Linda Maria Koldau, Frauen - Musik - Kultur. Ein Handbuch zum deutschen Sprachgebiet der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, Weimar et al. 2005) for H-German net, July 2007.