Leverhulme Award for Mirka
Reader in Music Dr Danuta Mirka has just been awarded a prestigious Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, in support of her project Hypermeter and Phrase Structure in Eighteenth-Century Music.
The aim of the project is to give a comprehensive account of the ways in which hypermeter and phrase structure were described by eighteenth-century music theorists, conceived by eighteenth-century composers and perceived by eighteenth-century listeners. Dr Mirka will study historical sources to discover how thinking about phrase structure developed during the eighteenth century, and expand her dynamic model of metric perception in order to explain how perception of hypermeter differs from perception of meter proper. She will illustrate the theoretical discussion with analyses of string chamber music by Haydn and Mozart, which will shed a new light upon this celebrated repertoire. The Leverhulme award of £44,000 will provide support for the project in the form of teaching replacement and research expenses.