Key research themes
1. How do Baroque composers integrate musical form and textsetting conventions to shape affect and expression in English vocal music?
This research theme explores the specific compositional choices regarding textsetting, syllabic treatment, and word-repetition practices in English Baroque vocal music, focusing particularly on how these practices relate to poetic form, meter, and expressive intent. By examining a corpus of Henry Purcell’s songs alongside previous scholarship, this theme provides detailed insights into the interplay between poetic structure and musical rhetoric, revealing how composers employed or omitted word-repetition and syllable-extension strategies to achieve distinct expressive effects.
2. What are the conceptual and philosophical frameworks linking Baroque music, aesthetics, and semiotics within cultural theory?
This research theme investigates the philosophical and semiotic conceptions of the Baroque as an artistic and cultural paradigm, focusing on how theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Juri Lotman interpret Baroque aesthetics through ideas such as folding, the monad, and the semiosphere. It explores the integration of Baroque musical harmony and structure within broader reflections on meaning-making, cultural dynamics, and the epistemological implications of Baroque art and music as 'total art'. This theme offers insights into the complex interplay between Baroque musical forms and their philosophical representations in cultural theory.
3. How did social, political, and economic contexts shape Baroque musical practices, patronage, and institutional development?
This theme examines the ways Baroque music and musicians were deeply embedded in the political, religious, and economic life of their time. It includes studies of courtly patronage systems, financial aspects of musical institutions, confessional conflicts influencing sacred music, and the intersection of music with cultural and political identity. These perspectives provide a multi-dimensional understanding of Baroque music as both an artistic and socio-political phenomenon.