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Dr Aidan Thomson







Dr Aidan Thomson
Lecturer in Music

Email: a.thomson@qub.ac.uk
Tel: +44 28 9097 5208
Office: Music Building

Address: School of Music and Sonic Arts, Music Building, Queen's University Belfast,
BT7 1NN


Key Roles:

Convenor, BMus degree programme (on study leave, 2009/10 Semester 2)
Elected member, Academic Council (until 2009)

Convenor of following modules:
British Musical Renaissance (MUS3049), Second Viennese School (MUS3050), History of Western Music, Repertory B (20th century) (MUS1042)

Acting convenor of following modules:
Dissertation (MUS3084), Special Project (MUS3076), Directed Study (MUS3099)



Achievements and Distinctions

 

Aidan Thomson was born in Glasgow in 1975, and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford and King’s College, London. Before being appointed to the School of Music in 2003 as Lecturer in Music, he held a part-time lectureship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a teaching fellowship at the University of Leeds. His teaching duties at Queen’s range from first-year survey courses (Classical & Romantic, and Twentieth Century) to early/mid twentieth-century historical modules on the British Musical Renaissance and the Second Viennese School.
Dr. Thomson has recently had articles published in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar and in 19th-Century Music, and has two other articles forthcoming in Elgar Studies and Elgar and his world. He has spoken at a number of international conferences, including the fourth Biennial International Music in 19th-Century Britain conference at University of Leeds (July 2003), the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society in Houston (November 2003) and Quebec City (November 2007), the thirteenth Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music in Durham (July 2004), the Dublin International Conference on Music Analysis (June 2005), and the second biennial North American British Music Studies Association conference in Burlington, Vermont (August 2006). He has recently been elected to the boards of both the Royal Musical Association, where he serves on the Proceedings Committee, and the North American British Music Studies Association.
A violinist, he is a former leader of the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (1997), and led and managed the orchestra of New Chamber Opera in Oxford.

 



Research Interests


Elgar, Bax, Vaughan Williams, Smyth, early twentieth-century British music, the Internationale Musikgesellschaft 1899-1914


Current Work

 

Elgar: completion of monograph, Demythologizing Elgar, for Boydell and Brewer
Bax: preparation of conference paper, ‘Bax and the “Celtic North” as a critique of English pastoralism’, for publication as an article
Smyth: preparation of papers for conferences in Detmold and Oxford

 

Dr. Thomson's research is concerned with early twentieth-century British music, particularly that of Elgar. His doctoral dissertation, completed in Oxford in 2002 under the supervision of Dr. Peter Franklin, and entitled ‘Re-reading Elgar: Hermeneutics, Criticism and Reception in England and Germany, 1900-1914’, recontextualises Elgar in the light of contemporary criticism of his work in Germany, and covers such diverse areas of study as medieval mysticism and urban planning. He is currently converting this thesis into a monograph, Demythologizing Elgar, to be published by Boydell and Brewer. His other research interests include Arnold Bax, Ethel Smyth, and the history of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft before 1914.

Selected Publications

  • ‘Elgar’s Critical Critics’, in Byron Adams (ed.), Elgar and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp.193-222.
  • ‘Early reviews of The Apostles in British periodicals’, in Byron Adams (ed.), Elgar and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp.127-72.
  • ‘Unmaking The Music Makers’, chapter 4 in Julian Rushton and J.P.E. Harper-Scott (ed.), Elgar Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.99-134.
  • ‘Elgar and Chivalry’, in 19th-Century Music, vol. 28, no. 3 (spring 2005), pp.259-75.
  • ‘Elgar in German criticism’, chapter 15 in Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Elgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.204-13.


Research Grants

British Academy Overseas Conference Grant, 2007 (£500)

Research Students
Ciara Burnell (PhD)