“Sounds of the City”
Nicholas Mathew
Music, UC Berkeley
Wednesday, November 1, 12:00-1:30pm
Cal Design Lab, Wurster 494, Wurster Hall
Part of the City as Nexus Colloquium; visitors welcome.
Nicholas Mathew was born in Norwich, in Norfolk, England, and took his first degree at Oxford University, studying the piano concurrently at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He holds a PhD from Cornell University, where he also studied period pianos with Malcolm Bilson. Before joining Berkeley, he returned to Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow in Music at Jesus College. For three years he was co-editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music, and he remains on its editorial board, as well as the advisory board of Eighteenth-Century Studies.
His published work has mainly focused on the relationships between music and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the place of music in political institutions, the role of music in public life, and the ways in which music constructs collective identity – as well as issues of political appropriation, subversion, musical trashiness, and political kitsch.
Alongside Nicholas de Moncheaux, Mathew co-taught the GUH graduate seminar “Sound and the City” during the Spring 2016 semester.