Thomas James Samson, FBA (born 6 July 1946), commonly known as Jim Samson, is a musicologist and retired academic. [1] Described as "a leading authority on the music of Chopin", his research extends to Romantic music, early 20th-century classical music and the music of east Central Europe in general. [1]
Thomas James Samson was born on 6 July 1946 in Carnlough in Northern Ireland. Educated at Queen's University Belfast (BMus) and studied with Arnold Whittall at the University College, Cardiff (MMus, PhD). [1]
Samson was appointed to a research fellowship at the University of Leicester in 1972. He moved to the University of Exeter in 1973 as a lecturer; promotions followed, to reader in 1987 and Professor of Musicology in 1992. In 1994, he was appointed Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, and was then Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, between 2002 and 2011. [2] [3]
Samson was awarded the Order of Merit by the Polish government in 1990 [2] [4] and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy, in 2000. In 2018, he received the IRC Harrison Medal from the Society for Musicology in Ireland. [5]
Christopher Jarvis Haley Hogwood was an English conductor, harpsichordist, writer, and musicologist. Founder of the early music ensemble the Academy of Ancient Music, he was an authority on historically informed performance and a leading figure in the early music revival of the late 20th century.
The Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58, is a piano sonata in four movements composed by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin; it is the second of the composer's three mature sonatas(the others being the Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35, and the Sonata for Piano and Cello in G minor, Op. 65). Completed in 1844 and published in 1845, the work is considered to be one of Chopin's most difficult compositions, both technically and musically. The work has a structure similar to Piano Sonata No. 5 in F Sharp Minor, Op. 81 by Johann Nepomuk Hummel. A performance of the sonata lasts around 23 to 30 minutes, depending on whether the repetition of the exposition in the first movement is observed. The work is dedicated to Countess Élise de Perthuis.
Nicholas Cook, is a British musicologist and writer born in Athens, Greece. From 2009 to 2017, he was the 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Darwin College. Previously, he was professorial research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). He has also taught at the University of Hong Kong, University of Sydney, and University of Southampton, where he served as dean of arts.
Étude Op. 10, No. 1 in C major is a study for solo piano composed by Frédéric Chopin in 1829. It was first published in 1833 in France, Germany, and England as the first piece of his Études Op. 10. This study in reach and arpeggios focuses on stretching the fingers of the right hand. The American music critic James Huneker (1857–1921) compared the "hypnotic charm" that these "dizzy acclivities and descents exercise for eye as well as ear" to the frightening staircases in Giovanni Battista Piranesi's prints of the Carceri d'invenzione. Virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who refused to perform this étude in public, said, "For me, the most difficult one of all is the C Major, the first one, Op. 10, No. 1."
Margaret Bent CBE, is an English musicologist who specializes in music of the late medieval and Renaissance eras. In particular, she has written extensively on the Old Hall Manuscript, English masses as well as the works of Johannes Ciconia and John Dunstaple.
Derek Attridge FBA is a South African-born British academic in the field of English literature. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, having retired from the university in 2016, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Attridge undertakes research in South African literature, James Joyce, modern fiction, deconstruction and literary theory and the history and performance of poetry. He is the author or editor of thirty books, and has published eighty articles in essay collections and a similar number in journals. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship, and Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and All Souls and St. Catherine's Colleges, Oxford. Among the visiting positions he has held have been professorships at the American University of Cairo, the University of Sassari, the University of Cape Town, Northwestern University, Wellesley College, and the University of Queensland.
Ann Buckley is an Irish musicologist, born in Dublin.
Gregory Claeys is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of London.
Over the years 1825–1849, Frédéric Chopin wrote at least 59 compositions for piano called Mazurkas. Mazurka refers to one of the traditional Polish dances.
Philip Brett was a British-born American musicologist, musician and conductor. He was particularly known for his scholarly studies on Benjamin Britten and William Byrd and for his contributions to the development of lesbian and gay musicology. At the time of his death, he was Distinguished Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Maciej Gołąb is a Polish musicologist.
Mark Everist is a British music historian, critic and musicologist.
J. P. E. Harper-Scott is a British musicologist and formerly Professor of Music History and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'Music in Context'.
Gordon Graham (1949) is Chair of the Edinburgh Sacred Arts Foundation, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary in the USA, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's premier academy of science and letters.
Francis Llewellyn Harrison, FBA, better known as "Frank Harrison" or "Frank Ll. Harrison" was one of the leading musicologists of his time and a pioneering ethnomusicologist. Initially trained as an organist and composer, he turned to musicology in the early 1950s, first specialising in English and Irish music of the Middle Ages and increasingly turning to ethnomusicological subjects in the course of his career. His Music in Medieval Britain (1958) is still a standard work on the subject, and Time, Place and Music (1973) is a key textbook on ethnomusicology.
Harry White is an Irish musicologist and university professor. With specialisations in Irish musical and cultural history, the music of the Austrian baroque composer Johann Joseph Fux, and the development of Anglo-American musicology since 1945, he is one of the most widely published and influential academics in his areas of research. White is also a poet, with two published collections of poetry.
The Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI) is an Irish learned society in the field of musicology. Founded in 2003, it reflects the growing research activity and the increasing academic tuition available at Irish universities in the fields of music and musicology that has been visible since the early 1990s. Since 2011, the SMI benefits from charitable tax exemption by the Revenue Commissioners.
Ruth Mary Tatlow was born in London, England in 1956, and grew up in Colton, Staffordshire. She is a British-Swedish Bach scholar, musicologist and writer, and since 2017 a visiting research fellow in the musicology department at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Jeffrey Kallberg is an American musicologist, who specializes 19th and 20th-century classical music, as well as topics in critical theory and gender studies related to music. He is a leading scholar on the life and works of the composer Frédéric Chopin, who is the subject of much of his research.
Jonathan Guy Evrill Cross, FBA, is a British musicologist who specialises in the 20th- and 21st-century music. He is an expert on the work of the British composer Harrison Birtwistle and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.