Research interests

Staff music research interests aim both to support current undergraduate elective module teaching and to support the wider research environment of the University. 

Please contact the Music Centre ([email protected]) if you would like to explore a new research collaboration with a member of staff whose current music research interests (listed below) best matches your area of enquiry. 

Chris Bragg
Research interests include:

• organ history, design and restoration of historic instruments
• 20th-century organ reform movement
• particular interest in historic organs in Scotland and Germany.

Michael Downes
Research interests include:

• opera (music, text, translation, performance)
• relationships between music and religion
• art song
• Wagner and Wagnerism
• late 19th and early 20th-century music, especially in Paris (Debussy, Stravinsky) and Britain (Elgar, Britten).

Michael Ferguson
Research interests include:

• sacred music, particularly Catholic church liturgy in modern Scotland.

Jonathan Kemp
Research interests include:

• acoustics
• guitar strings
• brass instruments
• consonance
• bioacoustics.

Jane Pettegree
Research interests include:

• early modern drama and opera
• song lyric and poetics
• performance and identity
• ethnomusicology, especially of Scottish music.

Tom Wilkinson
Research interests include:

• early keyboard instruments and performance
• J S Bach music compositions and reception.

Bede Williams
Research interests include:

• artistic research
• composer-performer collaboration
• conducting.