Dr Paul Rodmell BMus PhD

Senior Lecturer and Director of Performance

Department of Music

Contact details

Telephone +44 (0)121 414 5793

Email p.j.rodmell@bham.ac.uk

Arts Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

About


I am a musicologist who focuses primarily on music in the British Isles in the later nineteenth century (from about 1850 to 1918), with particular interests in opera and church music.

Qualifications

BMus (Birmingham)

PhD (Birmingham)

Teaching

I am currently the Programme Lead for Undergraduate Music and the Department’s Director of Performance. This means I am responsible for the overall smooth running of the BMus and Joint Honours Music programmes, and also manage solo performance tuition.

I teach or contribute to a variety of modules including:

Core Modules:

  • Tonal Harmony and Counterpoint (Year 1) 
  • Context 2a (The Age of Romanticism) (Year 2)

Optional Year 2/3 modules:

  • Orchestration
  • British Music Renaissance
  • Brahms
  • From Glinka to Glazunov
  • Music in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich

Postgraduate supervision

Whilst my own research focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I have supervised a number of research theses which extend both forwards and backwards from this period.  These have been principally at MPhil level, but I also currently supervise four doctoral students.  Research topics have included both the musical style and canticles of Herbert Howells, the English Symphony before Elgar, the conductor Rudolf Schwarz, the dramatic works of Granville Bantock, the Broadwood Company Archive, and English musicals post 1980.  I am happy to talk to potential students about research topics focused on British music and musical culture between 1800 and 1950.

 

Research

My research focuses on music and musical culture in the United Kingdom from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the First World War.  I am currently completing a book on Britain’s operatic culture between 1875 and 1918 which examines repertory performed, company organisation, the challenges faced by the British opera composer, and social attitudes to opera.  This will be published by Ashgate in 2013.  While my primary activity is currently focused on opera, I also have strong interests in music in the Anglican church in this period, and in various aspects of art music in Ireland.  Most of this develops out of my original doctoral research which focused on the operas of Charles Stanford; since then I have published a monograph on Stanford’s life and works (Ashgate, 2002) and other work has often arisen as branches of this original research.  I have recently completed editing a book on Music and Institutions in Nineteenth Century Britain (to be published by Ashgate, 2012) and completed an article on late Victorian Creed Settings.

Publications

 

‘A Tale of Two Operas: Stanford’s Savonarola and The Canterbury Pilgrims from Gestation to Production’, Music and Letters, lxxviii, 1997, 77–91. [Article in peer-reviewed journal]

‘W S Gilbert: a classic Victorian and his theatre by Jane Stedman’, Music and Letters, lxxviii, 1997, 607–08.  [Review article]

‘Nineteenth Century British Music Studies Volume 1, edited by Bennet Zon’, Notes, lxxvii, 2000, 134–36, [Review article]

‘Music and British Culture 1785–1914: Essays in honour of Cyril Ehrlich, edited by Christine Bashford and Leanne Langley’, Nineteenth Century Music Review, ii, 2005 [Review article]

Charles Villiers Stanford (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002) [Single-authored book]

‘”Double, double, toil and trouble”: Producing MacBeth in Victorian Britain, Verdi Forum, xxx–xxxi, 2003–04, 37–47 [Article in peer-reviewed journal]

‘”The Italians are Coming”: Opera in mid-Victorian Dublin’ in Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton (eds.), Europe, Empire and Spectacle in Nineteenth Century British Music (Aldershot; Ashgate, 2006) 97–112 [Chapter in Edited Book]

‘The Antient Concerts Society, Dublin, 1834–64’, in Michael Murphy and Jan Smaczny (eds.), Irish Musical Studies 9: Music in Nineteenth Century Ireland, (Dublin: Four Courts Press: 2007), 254–79 [Chapter in Edited Book]

The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan. Ed. by David Eden and Meinhard Saremba. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Music and Letters (2011) 92(3): 495-49 [Review Article](2011) 92(3): 495-49 [Review Article]

Forthcoming:

Music and Institutions in Nineteenth Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, expected 2012) [Edited multi-contributor volume] 

Opera in Britain 1875-1918 (Aldershot: Ashgate, expected 2013) [Single-authored book]

‘”The Meretricious Charms of Melody”: On setting the Nicene Creed on late-Victorian England’ [Article: under consideration]

Philip Ross Bullock, Rosa Newmarch and Russian music in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England (RMA Monographs 18) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) [Review article to be published in the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland]

Expertise

Classical music in Great Britain and Ireland in the Victorian and Edwardian periods (c.1830 - 1918)

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