Musicology - 20th Century Music

Since the days of Smith Brindle, Bernard Rands and William Mathias, twentieth-century music has played an active and dynamic role in shaping Bangor’s research profile in both composition and musicology. In the twenty-first century, Bangor has sought to embrace the exhilarating diversity and heterogeneity of the previous century, as represented in the research interests of School of Music staff, which range from fin-de siècle European composers to popular music and minimalism.

Bruce Wood

Prof Bruce Wood is contributing three forthcoming volumes to the complete Elgar Society edition:

11        Sacred music, with orchestra
12        Sacred music, with organ or unaccompanied

24        Music for string orchestra

Christian Leitmeir

Over the years Dr Christian Leitmeir has made numerous contributions to the history of musicological scholarship in the first half of the 20th century. The politics of the discipline during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich (Adolf Sandberger, Theodor Kroyer, Otto Ursprung, Ernst Bücken) feature in his research as well as methodological issues in the study, edition and performance of early music (Rudolf von Ficker).

His fascination for ‘untimely’ music of the early 20th century, which falls between neatly divided categories of Late-Romanticism, Modernism and New Music, has spurred research into the works of Richard Strauss (especially the experimental works of the 20s and 30s) and Ludwig Thuille as well as the composer-musicologists Adolf Sandberger and Egon Wellesz.

Chris Collins

Dr Chris Collins has been instrumental in putting the hitherto neglected study of 20th-century Spanish music on the British agenda, and in locating it in the context of nationalism and modernism in Europe as a whole. He has published on Manuel de Falla in the UK, USA and Spain, and has recently presented papers in Leeds, Sheffield and Paris.