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Doctor David Bretherton

Dr David Bretherton

Associate Professor

Research interests

  • Queer Music Theory
  • 19th-Century European Art Song
  • Theories of European Common-Practice Harmony

More research

Email: d.bretherton@soton.ac.uk

Address: B28, East Highfield Campus, University Road, SO17 1BJ

Research

Research groups

Research interests

  • Queer Music Theory
  • 19th-Century European Art Song
  • Theories of European Common-Practice Harmony
  • Music Theory and Analysis
  • Franz Schubert

Current research

David's fields of research are: (a) the theory and analysis of common-practice European music, particularly of the 19th century; and (b) queer music theory. His doctoral thesis, 'The Poetics of Schubert's Song-Forms' (University of Oxford, 2008), examined the songs of the nineteenth-century Austrian composer Franz Schubert using Schenkerian techniques and close reading, and he has since published numerous articles on this subject in Music & Letters, Music Analysis and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. He also has a keen interest in Schenker studies, having co-edited, with Ian Bent and William Drabkin, Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence (Boydell & Brewer, 2014). David's more recent research, which is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship, considers the intersection of queer theory and music theory, and asks – among other things – how a composer's sexuality may or may not be relevant to the works they compose, and the role that music analysis might play in answering this question. 

Research projects

Completed projects

Sponsor: Arts & Humanities Research Council
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