Austin Glatthorn Music PhD Researcher

Austin Glatthorn was born and raised in suburban Philadelphia, USA. After completing his undergraduate degree in Music Education (B.M.) at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, he decided to leave the U.S. to pursue a masters degree in historical musicology at the University of Southampton. After a year of course work and archival research in Germany, Austin then completed his M.M. on the Harmoniemusik of the princely family of Thurn und Taxis (Regensburg, Germany). In 2012 he began his Ph.D. in historical musicology under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Irvine and Professor Mark Everist, where he is researching the music of the late Holy Roman Empire. Currently, Austin is a DAAD-Fellow at the University of Mainz where he is spending a year researching in various German and Austrian archives under the mentorship of Professor Klaus Pietschmann.

Austin’s doctoral thesis, ‘The Theatre of Politics and the Politics of Theatre: Music as Representational Culture at the End of the Holy Roman Empire’, investigates the music of the Holy Roman Empire during its final two decades, from 1786-1806.  Shaped by the pro-Prussian narratives of nineteenth-century German nationalist historiography, many scholars have used the Holy Roman Empire as a tool to explain the hardships Germany faced from the dissolution of the Empire in 1806 until well past the Second World War. In musicology, the Reich earns hardly a mention, even in a slew of recent work on music and politics in late eighteenth-century Germanic lands.  In recent years, however, Anglophone historians have proposed a new approach to the Holy Roman Empire, arguing that it was a viable political body and an important context for culture.  His thesis comprises a series of case studies that works on two levels: music’s place amongst a Holy Roman imperial identity and detailed examples of how music was used as a mouthpiece for political representation.  In Austin’s thesis he argues that there was more to the Empire’s musical culture than the output of Vienna-based composers.  In turn, Austin proposes a new perspective that highlights music’s place across a vast and millennium-old Empire.