Music, University of Southampton

Mark Everist's research focuses on the music of western Europe in the period 1150-1330, French 19th-century stage music between the Restoration and the Commune, Mozart, reception theory, and historiography. He is the author of Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century France (1989), French Motets in the Thirteenth Century (1994), Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824-1828 (2002), Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2005), and Mozart's Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture (2012), as well as editor of three volumes of the Magnus Liber Organi for Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre (2001-2003) and six collections of essays.

Mark taught at King's College London (1982-1996), and is now Professor of Music at the University of Southampton, where he was Head of Music from 1997-2001, and again from 2006-2010.  In 2010, he was appointed Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Humanities and Director of the Humanities Graduate School.  He teaches undergraduate courses on the middle ages, the 18th and 19th centuries, and masters courses on research methods and critical practice. His PhD supervision encompasses dissertations on early 19th century French opera, 15th-century mass composition, Sibelius, Verdi, the Notre-Dame conductus, organum and the 13th-century motet.

He has published in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Revue de Musicologie, Revue Belge de Musicologie, 19th-Century Music, Early Music History, Cambridge Opera Journal, Acta Musicologica, Plainsong and Medieval Music, Music & Letters, Journal of Musicology and elsewhere. He was editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association from 1990-1994, continues to serve as a member of its editorial board, and was the editor of the Royal Musical Association's monographs series from 1995-2011. A member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Advanced Research Panel 7 (Music and Performing Arts) from 2001 to 2005, he is now a member of its Peer Review College. He was an institutional auditor for the Quality Assurance Agency from 2002-2005, and was chair and leader for research of the committee of the National Association for Music in Higher Education from 2004 to 2008.  A recipient of publication prizes from the American Musicological Society in consecutive years (2010 and 2011), he is a fellow of the Academia Europaea, and President of the Royal Musical Association.

Mark's interests include polyphonic music 1150-1350; opera in 19th-century France; Mozart reception.

Current research

Projects marked * are largely complete.

Breaking into the Polyphonic Ballade Two surviving polyphonic songs survive from c1300 that provide evidence of how the polyphonic ballade sounded: a score-notated work, ‘Volez oyer le castoy’ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 8) and ‘Bien m’ont amors entrepris’ – ‘Tenor’ (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 846). Both songs exhibit patterns of repetition that point to attempts to combine ballade-like poetry with polyphony in ways that resemble what is understood of the polyphonic ballade from later in the century. In ‘Bien m’ont amors entrepris’ – ‘Tenor’, this involves both voices in the texture, and in ‘Volez oyer le castoy’ at least one voice and more frequently two at any one time. The two works are sufficiently different to give a clear sense of some of the issues circulating around the creation of the polyphonic ballade c1300.

Geographies of Polyphonic Song c 1300: Mapping Composition from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut *The briefest of glances at the contributing repertories of this period demonstrates both some striking geographical connections and important topographical separations. The body of motets that build song structures out of chanson tenors, for example, was cultivated and copied in both Paris and a Walloon-speaking focused on Liège. Similarly, the production of rondeau-motets –an important element in the emergence of polyphonic song – was centered on both Paris and the country of Artois, whereas score-notated rondeaux were found in Picardy and Artois. Compositions that exploit ballade structures, furthermore, were developed in regions as scattered as Burgundy and Anglo-Norman Essex. And to consider the geographical background of a key theoretical witness to this tradition, Johannes de Grocheo, is to see the geographical spread of interest in polyphonic song drift westwards into Normandy and the Brittany borders. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Drying Rachel's Tears: The Conductus cum caudis as Mixed Form *The conductus cum caudis exploits a number of contrasting discursive modes: musica sine littera (syllabic, neumatic, melismatic and the punctus organicus) in ways that echo the construction of the 12th-century literary prosimetrum (the alternation of verse and prose). This article examines the ways in which the different discursive modes in play in the conductus cum caudis create structure and ultimately an exegesis of the text that is set. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Machaut's Musical Heritage *Machaut’s musical heritage is uneven, in terms both of its sources and in the degree of continuity to which those sources seem to point. The immediate background for the Mass is clear and understood, and a good case can be made for acknowledging a greater continuity between Machaut’s motets and his predecessors. In some cases, the Hoquetus David for example, Machaut’s heritage serves as a point of reference in a conscious effort to revive the past. Nowhere is understanding Machaut’s heritage more fraught than in the secular songs, where – at one extreme – one can point to very clear continuities in the lai repertory while having to recognise the very significant difficulties with other genres. What this chapter shows is the highly variable degree to which Machaut can be considered an innovator, and – like many figures whose reputation survives from his own time into the present – it may well be that this eclectic, even opportunistic, approach to the music of his past may determine the position he holds today. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Transcription and Textuality - Measure and Meter: A New Source for Polyphonic Latin Song c1200 *Polyphonic Latin songs in the 12th and 13th centuries were called conducti by contemporaries. They ranged from monodies to works in three and four parts, and from simple syllabic settings to pieces that exploited a variety of musical discourses. By far the largest species consisted of two-part conducti cum caudis, compositions that developed musical meaning from juxtaposing sections in straightforward syllabic style (cum littera) against fully-modal melismatic caudae (sine littera). The disposition of musica cum littera and sine littera created structures that go beyond the text. Taking two works found in a source hitherto unknown in the musicological literature (Münster, Staatsarchiv, Mscr. VII, 6115), ‘Dei sapientia’ and ‘Genitus divinitus’, and placing them among previously identified sources, shows that the two conducti were copied side by side not only in the Münster source but also contiguously in a manuscript discovered in the 1990s (Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, 117*); details of the two readings of the two conducti furthermore suggest that the two works belonged together sufficiently to be copied alongside each other twice. The subject matter of the texts, their structure (both three stanzas of proparoxytonic heptasyllables), the sources in which they are preserved, and the balance of music cum and sine littera in both, make them an ideal environment in which to examine issues of structure and meaning in the conductus. Caudae are frequently found at the end of stanzas, and while ‘Dei sapientia’ and ‘Genitus divinitus’ show this clearly, they show subtle differences that evoke questions of transcription and their relationship to analysis. Also important is the placement of caudae elsewhere in the works, where their inclusion points up linguistic and poetic conceits in the text, but also raises questions of balance and symmetry. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Meyerbeer and The Hound of the Baskervilles *Taking the final scene of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles as its starting point, this article looks at the ways in which act iv of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots was projected across a range of media in the second half of the 19th century. Case studies include Wagner’s consistent view of the subject in the context of a rapidly changing view of Meyerbeer's work in general, Offenbach’s parody of the ‘Blessing of the Daggers’, Jules Verne’s re-inscription of the entire act in Une Fantaisie du Docteur Ox and Liszt’s two versions of his Reminiscences des Huguenots. The case studies are sited in the context of contemporary theories of metaphor and reception. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Liszt in Southampton: the Grande Valse di bravura (S209) and the Valse de bravoure (S214/1) Just before his concert tour on the South Coast in August-September 1840, Franz Liszt wrote out an extract from the reworked version of the Grande Valse di bravura (S209). The autograph, now in private hands, represents a critically early stage in the revision of the work that would eventually result in the Valse de bravoure (S214/1). The compositional history of the work raises issues of virtuosity, textual consistency and the status of the Albumblatt and Zwischenstufe.

Beethoven and Rossini: Opera and Concert at the End of the Restoration *The fact that Beethoven's Symphony no 6 (Pastoral) was first performed in Paris a matter of months before the overture to Rossini's Guillaume Tell cannot be mere coincidence. Building on a reading of the Tell overture as a creative rehearing of the Beethoven symphony, this study considers the reflexive relationship of programmatic music in the concert hall and purely instrumental music in the opera house. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

The Music of Power: Parisian Opera and the Politics of Genre, 1806-1864 *Music for the stage has always been embedded in a network of power relationships between states, impresarios, librettists, artists, entrepreneurs and composers. This article seeks to understand and explain how these relationships functioned in a particularly well-documented domain: the period when French music drama was subject to a system of licences, 1806-1864. The project examines institutional structures and their relationship both to those responsible for the creation and cultivation of stage music in the period and to the structure and form of the resulting works themselves. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Orphée aux enfers : Classical Antiquity, opéra comique and opérette in the 1850s The Second Empire's concern for classical antiquity spilled over into a series of works for the Opéra-Comique and Théâtre Lyrique that spun a consistent music-dramatic thread throughout the 1850s. Adam's Giralda, Massé's Galathée, and others formed a cultural background to the comic reinterpretation of antique legend that was to result in Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers and La belle Hélène.

The Star of Genius from the Land of the Valkyries *The years between Liszt’s retirement from the virtuoso circuit in 1847 and Thalberg’s departure for the USA in 1855 saw a recrudescence in the number of pianistic travellers across Europe, and nowhere was this more visible than in Paris. By early 1852, the critic Pier-Angelo Fiorentino could complain about a ‘mania’ for concerts, which however met with the approval of his critic-colleagues. The arrival of the pianist Ern(e)st Haberbier in late 1851 triggered a reassessment of both Liszt and Thalberg as Paris recognised – for a few months – their successor. Almost an exact contemporary of both Liszt and Thalberg, Haberbier came to Paris en route from a travelling career that had already encompassed his home in Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia and England. Aside from the qualities of his playing and the technical advances he brought with him, he was remarkable for including a significant range of music by his contemporaries in his concerts (including both Liszt and Thalberg, as well as Chopin, whom one critic had him ventriloquise), but also for inscribing into his performances his itinerary as a travelling virtuoso. Thus, by the time of his arrival in Paris, his repertory included Souvenirs de Norwège, a Hymne national de Danemarck and Chants suédois; some critics thought he was Norwegian while for others he was made to embody the spirit of the North. Haberbier’s Parisian light shone for less than a year, by June 1852 he was in Strasbourg, and by August in Baden. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Rehearsing grand opéra: conditions and contexts *Recent studies have considered piano-vocal arrangements and two-hand versions of opera an important part of their reception, focusing on and rightly stressing their importance for domestic consumption. This chapter considers the importance of individual published numbers used for the purposes of rehearsal. For opéra comique, this was largely unproblematic since published vocal extracts largely included all the music with the rest recoverable from the printed libretto. The case of grand opéra was much less clear since published extracts frequently excluded recitatives that could involve some of the most taxing moments in the work. The solutions frequently involved compiling rehearsal volumes from published extracts and handwritten copies of those parts of the recitative that were relevant. The result was a striking collision of print and manuscript cultures created by a mismatch between musical practices and publishing traditions. The issues are clarified by an examination of surviving volumes with a case study based around Halévy’s La juive (1835) and Charles VI (1843), and Flotow’s L’âme en peine (1846) as rehearsed by the artist who took the roles of Eudoxie, Isabelle de Barrière and Paola sometime in the late 1840s or early 1850s. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Phantoms of the Opera Gaston Leroux’s Le fantôme de l’Opéra (1910) dramatizes the newly-built Palais Garnier as the backdrop to one of the best-known operatic stories of all time. While the diegetic musical emphases in his text centre on Gounod’s Faust, there is a subtext that requires the association of Eric (le fantôme) with Mozart: the composition of a Requiem, a mass to celebrate his wedding and a work called Don Juan Triumphant. This Mozartian element is maintained and enhanced in the silent films of the 1920s but is entirely effaced in later cinematographic and mega-musical presentations of the story. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Mozart's 'Twelfth Mass' *For the world of Mozart scholarship, the composer’s so-called ‘Twelfth Mass’ is a closed case. Despite its great popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so the argument goes, the work is clearly not by Mozart, but probably by Wenzel Müller; it is therefore consigned to K. Anh. 232 / C1.04. With the exception of its presence in recent studies of Novello’s publishing house (who was responsible for its first publication in 1819, and who assigned its number), the work has sunk without trace from the field, deprived of a critical edition, professional modern recording or a place in the history of music. But for the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, Mozart’s ‘Twelfth Mass’ was – together with the Requiem – his most popular sacred work, and for the composer’s biographer Edward Holmes it could rival Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte in 19th century musical affections. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

Mozart and the 19th-Century Parisian Press: The Musicography of Henri Blaze de Bury *This project attempts to give an alternative perspective both to our understanding of how Mozart was received by the most important European musical centre in the 19th century and to the more general world of Parisian musical journalism by examining the changing views on Mozart during the half century that Ange-Henri Blaze (dit Blaze de Bury; 1813-1888) wrote music criticism for the Revue des deux mondes (1834-1882). It puts in place a complete machine-readable electronic corpus of Blaze de Bury’s writings on music in order to permit an exhaustive account of not just what his views on Mozart were but how they changed over the course of the period during which his criticism was published. Email Mark if you would like access to a copy of the current version of this piece of work.

The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (joint editor; under contract)
Edition of Franz Liszt, Dom Sanche, ou Le Château d’Amour for the series F. Liszt: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke
Edition of Giuseppe Verdi, Les vepres siciliennes for the series The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (Chicago: Chicago University Press)

Performance

Mark has acted as consultant for the Hilliard Ensemble, the Orlando Consort, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, English National Opera and The Royal Ballet. He currently acts as consultant to Opera Rara, Red Byrd and Ensemble De Cælis. CDs with which he has been associated are listed below:

• Red Byrd, ‘Paris 1200: Notre-Dame Music for Christmas'. BBC Radio 3, December 1995 Hilliard Ensemble, ‘Perotin and the Ars Antiqua'. hilliard LIVE 1.HL1001, 1996

• Orlando Consort, ‘Mystery of Notre Dame: Chant and Polyphony'. DG 453 487-2, 1997

• Red Byrd, ‘Magister Leoninus: Sacred Music from 12th-Century Paris'. Hyperion CDA66944, 1997

• Red Byrd, ‘Magister Leoninus: Sacred Music from 12th-Century Paris -2'. Hyperion CDA67289, 2001

• De Cælis, ‘O felices lacrimæ'. Studio SM D2930, 2002

• Giacomo Meyerbeer: Margherita d'Anjou . Opera Rara ORC25, 2003

• Red Byrd, ‘A Scottish Lady Mass: Sacred Music from Medieval St Andrews'. Hyperion, CDA67299, 2005

• Giuseppe Verdi: Les Vêpres siciliennes. Opera Rara ORCV303, 2005

Professional activity

Visiting positions

University of Reading 1988-1989
Dartmouth College 1990
École Normale Supérieure, Paris [Conservatoire, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université de Tours], 1990-1991
Conservatoire Nationale Supérieur de Paris, October-November 2002 ; September 2004-January 2005
Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Western Australia, July-August 2004
University of Melbourne, August 2004
Trinity College, Dublin, November 2005
Ecole Normale Supérieure - Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon, December 2006
MacGeorge Fellow, University of Melbourne, July-September 2009

Professional bodies

Member of Council, Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society (1988-1990).
Member of Publications Subcommittee, Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society (1988-1990).
Corresponding Editor, Current Musicology.
Music Contributor, International Medieval Bibliography (1986-1992).
Organiser and session chair, 14th Annual Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music, London, 15-18th August, 1986.
Organiser, 22nd Annual Conference of Music Research Students, King’s College London, 16-19 December, 1988.
Editor, Journal of the Royal Musical Association (1990-1994).
Member of Council, Publications Committee, Proceedings Committee of the Royal Musical Association (1990-94).
Joint Coordinator, RMA/SotoMAC 93 Conference, University of Southampton, 26-28 March, 1993.
Session Respondent, Annual Meeting of American Musicological Society, Montréal, 4-6 November 1993.
Teaching Quality Assessment subject Assessor, 1994-95
Joint Coordinator, RMA One-Day Conference on Reception Theory and Music, King’s College London, 5 February 1994.
Editor, Royal Musical Association Monographs series, 1995-
Chair, Royal Musical Association Proceedings Committee, 1995-99
Coordinator and Chair of Programme Committee, British Musicology Conference 1996, King’s College London, April 1996.
Member of Jury international, Fondation Internationale Nadia et Lili Boulanger, February-September 1998
Coordinator and Chair of Programme Committee, PERFORMANCE 2000: 35 th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association, University of Southampton, 26-29 April 2000.
Member of comité scientifique, La Traduction des livrets: aspects théoriques, historiques et pragmatiques, Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne), November-December 2000
Member of comité scientifique, Vincenzo Bellini et la France, Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne), November 2001
Member of Arts and Humanities Research Board Research Panel 7 (Music and Performing Arts), 2001- 5
Quality Assurance Agency Institutional Auditor, 2002-2005
Member of Committee of National Association of Music in Higher Education (leader on research), 2002-2007; chair and leader on research, 2005-7
Member of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College, November 2006-
Member of Honorary Board of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini, November 2006-
Co-director of AHRC Network 'Francophone Music Criticism, 1789-1914' (with Institute of Musical Research, University of London), November 2006-
Member of Editorial Advisory Boad, Lyrebird Press (successor to Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre), February 2007-
Member of awards panel for Palisca Prize, American Musicological Society, February 2007-October 2010
Member of comité scientifique, Colloque : François-Auguste Gevaert, Université Libre de Bruxelles, December 2008
Member of Editorial Board, Musica disciplina, December 2008-
Member of Advisory Panel, GroveOnline, May 2009-
European Science Foundation Peer Reviewer, May 2009-
Royal Musical Association Publications Committee, Chair, January 2010-

Awards

Senior Scholarship, Keble College Oxford. October 1981
Senior Germaine Scholarship, Brasenose College Oxford. October 1982 (declined)
Fulford Research Fellowship, St Anne's College Oxford. October 1982 (proxime accessit)
University of London Central Research Fund Grant. March-April 1983
British Academy Research Grant. September 1986
British Academy Overseas Conference Grant. January 1988
Music and Letters Grant. January 1988
Westrup Prize (best article published in Music and Letters 1988). March 1989
King's College School of Humanities Research Grant. February 1990
British Academy Overseas Conference Grant. April 1990
British Academy Research Grant. July 1990
British Academy Research Grant. July 1991
British Academy Overseas Conference Grant. April 1991
King's College School of Humanities Research Grant. February 1992
British Academy Overseas Conference Grant. April 1992
British Academy Research Grant, March 1996 (Metz conductus fragments and Gluck/Castil-Blaze: £673.00)
Research Grant, School of Research and Graduate Studies, July 1996 (MLO IV: £2,064.00)
British Academy Research Grant, March 1997 (MLO III: £1,365.00)
Music and Letters Grant, July 1997 (MLO microfilms: £500.00)
Arts and Humanities Research Board Grant, Research Grant, February 1999 (Patterns of Mozart Reception: £36,686.00)
Arts and Humanities Research Board, Research Leave, January 2000 (MLO II: £17000.00)
Leverhulme Research Fellowhip, March 2000 (MLO II: £5,888.40); declined
Arts and Humanities Research Board, Small Grant, May 2000 (Weber: £3,503.00)
Arts and Humanities Research Board, Small Grant, January 2001 (Music Drama at the Paris Odéon: £841.00)
Arts and Humanities Research Board, Small Grant, May 2001 (Bellini: £4,638.00)
Arts and Humanities Research Board, Innovations Award, November 2001 (Polyphonic Music and the Culture of Medieval France: £23,747)
British Academy, Overseas Conference Grant, July 2002 (Donizetti and Wagner:£521)
British Academy, Research Grant, July 2003 (Mozart and the Impresario:£4,200)
British Academy, Overseas Conference Grant. April 2004 (Mozart and the Impresario:£750)
Arts and Humanities Research Council, Research Leave, July 2005 (Stage Music in Nineteenth-Century France: £14,013)
British Academy, Overseas Conference Grant. July 2005 (Mozart's Twelfth Mass: £400)
Arts and Humanities Research Council, Small Grant, October 2006 (Blaze de Bury: £15,764)
British Academy, Small Grant, January 2007 (Foreign Opera in Paris during the July Monarchy: Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz: £2,309)
British Academy, Small Grant, July 2008 (Opéra comique in the Second Empire: Institution and Repertory: £7,074)
British Academy, Overseas Conference Grant, July 2008 (Geographies of Polyphonic Song, £450)
Arts and Humanities Research Council, Research Leave, July 2009 (Mozart's Ghosts, £38,692)

Affiliate research groups:  Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Music Performance Research

Research projects