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L.J.Brooks@soton.ac.uk

Professor Jeanice Brooks 

Professor of Music, Doctoral Programme Director (Music department)

Professor Jeanice Brooks's photo

Professor Jeanice Brooks is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton.

I enjoy teaching at all undergraduate levels. I mainly lead early music courses, including a first-year core course as well as more specialised year two/three modules such as Love in the Renaissance and Jane Austen’s Playlist. I also support many students completing undergraduate and master's research projects, and I teach master's courses in research methods and critical practice.

Currently I supervise about half a dozen PhD students working on the cultural history of music from the 16th to the 20th centuries. I am happy to supervise doctoral work in early modern topics, in 20th-century French and British music, on domestic music making around 1800 and in music and gender (see my research interests for more about my areas of expertise). I welcome informal approaches from potential master's and PhD students who would like to discuss their interests. I'm also happy to work with potential students to help devise research and funding proposals in advance of application to one of our programmes.

I have been on research leave for 2019-2020, working on an AHRC-funded project called Music, Home, and Heritage: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain. I also completed an edited book and devised concert programmes for the 2020 Bard Music Festival, the first in this history of this event to be devoted to a female subject. Nadia Boulanger and Her World has been postponed because of covid-19, but will go ahead in the summer of 2021. In the meantime, I look forward to my return to teaching in 2020-21 and to working with UoS students on new challenges.

Research interests

Jeanice Brooks is a cultural historian of music. Her main interests include music and culture in Renaissance France; musical culture of the mid-twentieth century, especially the career of Nadia Boulanger; domestic music-making in Britain c. 1800; and song and gender. She gained a PhD in musicology with a minor in French literature, and continues to develop interdisciplinary research topics that draw on literary as well as musical sources. Her research on domestic music performance and material culture includes projects in collaboration with the National Trust and other heritage bodies.

Jeanice's book The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2013) uses the case of the famous French pedagogue to explore how modernist concepts of the musical work affected performance culture in the interwar period. Her Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago, 2000) – a monograph on music and courtly ideologies in the Renaissance – won the 2001 Roland H Bainton prize for the best book of the year in music or art history. Her articles have appeared in a wide range of journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Review of English Studies, Early Music History, Early Music, Revue de musicologie, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies and Revue belge de musicologie. From 1999–2004 she was co-editor of Music & Letters, and she led the digital edition of the Austen Family Music Books in 2015. Her work on Nadia Boulanger has led to two new edited books, both appearing in 2020: Nadia Boulanger and Her World, in association with the Bard Music Festival (University of Chicago Press) and Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music (University of Rochester Press).

Her current research for a new monograph, At Home with Music: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain, explores the role of music in material and ideological constructions of home. This research is supported by a major grant (2017-2021) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with partners from the Royal College of Music, the British Library, the National Trust, Sydney Living Museums and the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust. As well as historical research, the project seeks to construct imaginative musical interpretations for heritage visitors today. She has co-curated an exhibition at Boughton House (A Passion for Opera: The Duchess and the Georgian Stage, 2019) and contributed to Songs of Home at the Museum of Sydney (2019). Jeanice is the leader of the international Sound Heritage network, bringing together academic music historians, historic performance specialists, and heritage sector professionals for a collaborative approach to the research and interpretation of music in historic houses. Her co-edited essay collection, Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses, is scheduled for publication in 2021.

Affiliate research groups

Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Music Performance Research

Research project(s)

The Austen Family Music Books

Focusing on a heterogeneous set of pieces included in 17 music albums that belonged to Jane Austen and her female relations, this AHRC-funded project was a major study of domestic music making in the Austen family.

musicSpace - Dormant

This AHRC-EPSRC-JISC-funded project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between Music and Electronics and Computer Science that employed Semantic Web technologies to develop tools to integrate and enhance musicological metadata.

At Home with Music: Domestic Music-Making in Georgian Britain

Funded by the AHRC, ‘At Home with Music’ uncovered the hidden world of private music-making in Georgian Britain and explained how musical activities in the home contributed to contemporary concepts of emotion, gender, family and class.

The Trembling Line

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Books

The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Edited Books

The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Music, vol. 3, The Renaissance. Ed. with Richard Freedman. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021.

Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses. Ed. with Matthew Stephens and Wiebke Thormählen. London: Routledge, forthcoming 2021.

Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music. Ed. with Kimberly Francis. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, Eastman Studies in Music, 2020.

Nadia Boulanger and Her World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

A Passion for Opera: The Duchess and the Georgian Stage. Ed. with Wiebke Thormählen and Katrina Faulds. To accompany the exhibition at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, July-September 2019. Boughton House: Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust, 2019.

(Ed. with Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf), Music and Poetry in the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 2001.

Editions of Music

Motets de 1573 by Guillaume Boni. Tours: Centre de Musique Ancienne, 2000.

Chansons, odes et sonetz de Pierre Ronsard by Jean de Castro. Madison: A-R Editions, 1994.

(Ed. with Jean-Pierre Ouvrard), Chansons à quatre voix de François Regnard, Le Verger de Musique 2. Tours: Centre de Musique Ancienne, 1993.

Digital resource

The Austen Family Music Books. Digital facsimile edition, with commentary and catalogue, of manuscripts and binder's volumes owned by Jane Austen's family in the 18th and early 19th centuries. 2015. https://archive.org/details/austenfamilymusicbooks

Exhibitions

Songs of Home, Museum of Sydney (August-November 2019, curatorial consultant, producer for sound track items).

A Passion for Opera: The Duchess and the Georgian Stage, Boughton House (July-September 2019, co-curator).

The Paston Treasure: Microcosm of the Known World, Yale Center for British Art and Norwich Castle (2018, musical consultancy, catalogue essays).

Un air de Renaissance: La musique au XVIe siècle, Musée de la Renaissance, Ecouen (September 2013-January 2014; object choice, catalogue essay and consultancy).

Articles and Chapters

‘The Only Woman in the Picture’ (sole author), ‘Modern French Music: Translating Fauré in America, 1925-1945’ (sole author) and ‘Serious Ambitions: Nadia Boulanger and the Composition of La ville morte’ (co-author, with Kimberly Francis), in Nadia Boulanger and Her World, ed. Jeanice Brooks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  2020).

‘Musa belgica: La musique de Philippe de Monte et le mariage de 1570’, co-authored with Thorsten Hindrichs, in 1570, le mariage des arts, ed.  Hugues Daussy, Isabelle His, and Jean Vignes. Paris: Champion, 2019. 125-153.

‘Musical Soundscapes in the Historic House Museum’, in House Museums and the Interpretation of the Cultural, Social, Urban, Landscape: Proceedings of the 16th Annual DEMHIST International Conference, 3-9 July 2016, ed. Gianluca Kannès. Milan: DEMHIST, 2018. 55-62.

‘A Tudor Soundscape in a Historic House Chapel: Origins, Challenges and Evaluation’, co-authored with Matthew Tyler-Jones and Lucy Kauffman. Curator: The Museum Journal 62 (2019): 439-451.

‘Musical Dialogues in the Paston Treasure’, co-authored with Jonathan Wainwright, in The Paston Treasure: Microcosm of the Known World, ed. Andrew Moore, Francesca Vanke and Nathan Flis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, 162-171; sole author of catalogue entries no. 64 (pp. 334-35) and no. 139 (pp. 442-43).

'Making Music'.  In Jane Austen: Writer in the World, ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2017. 36-55.

'In Search of Austen's 'Missing Songs'. The Review of English Studies 67 (2016): 914-945. 

'Gossiping to Music in Sixteenth-Century France'. Renaissance Studies 30 (2016): 17-38.

'Music and the court of the ancien régime.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Music in France, ed. Simon Tresize. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 339-54.

'New Links Between Them: Modernist Historiographies and the Concerts of Nadia Boulanger.' In Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler. Basel: Paul Sacher Stiftung, 2014). 163-176.

‘Le corps chantant: Erasme, Janequin, et l’obscénité à la Renaissance.’ In Clément Janequin, un musicien parmi les poètes: Musique, voix et réalisme sonore à la Renaissance, ed. Olivier Halévy, Isabelle His and Jean Vignes. Paris: Société Française de Musicologie, 2013. 269–83.

‘Performing Love: Songs and Sincerity in Early Modern Europe.’ In Amor docet musicam: Musik und Liebe in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Dietrich Helms and Sabine Meine. Hildesheim: Olms, 2012. 143–56.

‘Tessier’s Travels in England and Scotland.’ Early Music 39 (2011): 185–94; and guest editorial to the issue ‘Lost and Found’ (co-authored with Melanie Marshall).

‘Introduction: L’obscénité comme jeu de frontières’ and ‘Singing the Courtly Body: The chanson lascive and the Performance of Obscenity.’ In Obscénités renaissantes, ed. Hugh Roberts, Lise Wajeman and Guillaume Peureux. Geneva: Droz, 2011. 109–113 and 193–206.

‘“All you need is love”: Music, Romance and Adolescent Recreation in Sixteenth-Century France.’ In Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men, ed. Karen Nelson and Amy Leonard. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. 169–94.

‘Musical Monuments for the Country House: Music, Collection and Display at Tatton Park.’ Music & Letters 91 (2010): 513–35.

‘Collecting Past and Present: Music History and Musical Performance at Dumbarton Oaks.’ In A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, ed. James Carder and Robert Nelson. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010. 74–91.

‘Les collections féminines d’albums de partitions dans l’Angleterre au début du XIXe siècle.’ In “La la la Maistre Henri”: Mélanges de musicologie offerts à Henri Vanhulst, ed. Christine Ballman and Valérie Dufour. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. 351–365.

‘Les écrits de Nadia Boulanger.’ In Les rencontres de Villecroze: Nadia et Lili Boulanger, ed. Alexandra Laederich. Lyon: Symétrie, 2007. 451–54.

‘Music as Erotic Magic in a Renaissance Romance.’ Renaissance Quarterly 60:4 (2007): 1207–56.

‘La musique mesurée et le salon: modes d’éxécution, pratiques d’écoute.’ In Académies italiennes et françaises de la Renaissance: idéaux et pratiques, ed. Jean Vignes, Ginette Vagenheim, Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Marc Deramaix. Geneva: Droz, 2007. 541–49.

‘L’art et la manière: ornementation et notation dans l’air de cour à la fin de la Renaissance.’ In Poésie, musique et société: l'air de cour en France au XVIIe siècle, ed. Georgie Durosoir. Liège: Mardaga/ Centre de Musique Baroque, 2006. 169–79.

‘Chivalric Romance, Courtly Love and Courtly Song: Female Vocality and Feminine Desire in the World of Amadis de Gaule.’ In Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, ed. Thomasin LaMay. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 63–96.

‘Ritterroman und höfisches Lied. Die weibliche Stimme im französischen Salon des späten 16. Jahrhunderts.’ In Frauen und Musik im Europa des 16. Jahrhunderts, Trossinger Jahrbuch für Renaissancemusik 4. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004. 91–114.

‘La lecture des Airs de cour de Gabriel Bataille: la “nouvelle musique” en France autour de 1600.’ In Lire à la Renaissance, ed. Jean Balsamo, La Lecture littéraire 7 (2003): 135–146.

‘O quelle armonye: Dialogue Singing in Late Renaissance France.’ Early Music History 22 (2003): 1–64.

‘“New Music” in Renaissance France.’ In Gesang zur Laute, Trossinger Jahrbuch für Renaissancemusik 2. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2002 [2003]. 161–75.

(with Mark Everist) ‘Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots: Staging the History of the French Renaissance.’ In The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century/ Le XIXe siècle renaissant, ed. Yannick Portebois and Nicholas Terpstra. Toronto: Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2003. 121–42.

‘From Minstrel to Courtier: The Royal Musique de Chambre and Courtly Ideals in Sixteenth-Century France.’ Musikalischer Alltag im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, Trossinger Jahrbuch für Renaissancemusik 1. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001 [2002]. 39–49.

‘The Art of Civil Conversation: Courtly Neoplatonism and the Dialogue Air.’ In Music and Poetry in the French Renaissance, ed. Philip Ford, Gillian Jondorf and Jeanice Brooks. Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 2001. 159–84.

‘Catherine de Médicis, nouvelle Artémise: Women’s Laments and the Virtue of Grief.’ Early Music 27 (1999): 419–35.

‘Professionalismus und öffentliche Karriere bei Frauen: Metaphern über Nadja Boulanger als Dirigentin.’ In Professionalismus in der Musik, ed. Christian Kaden and Volker Kalisch, Musik-Kultur 5. Essen: Blaue Eule, 1999. 252–60.

‘Music and Devotion in Renaissance Toulouse: The Motets of Guillaume Boni.’ In La musique de tous les passetemps le plus beau: Hommage à Jean-Michel Vaccaro, ed. François Lesure and Henri Vanhulst. Paris: Klincksieck, 1998. 17–31.

‘A Singer’s Book in the British Library.’ Early Music 26 (1998): 29–48.

‘Mildred Bliss Tells Nadia Boulanger to Think of Herself For Once.’ In Women Patrons and Activists in American Music, ed. Cyrilla Barr and Ralph P. Locke. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 209–13.

‘Music by Jean de Castro in the Parisian Library of Justinien Pense.’ Revue Belge de Musicologie/ Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 50 (1996 [1997]): 25–34.

‘Les Guises et l’air de cour: images musicales du prince guerrier.’ In Le mécénat et l’influence des Guises, ed. Yvonne Bellenger. Paris: Champion, 1997. 187–210.

‘Italy, the Ancient World, and the French Musical Inheritance in the Sixteenth Century: Arcadelt and Clereau in the Service of the Guises.’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association 121 (1996): 147–90.

‘Bertrand, Boni, Ronsard and the Process of Revision.’ In Claude Le Jeune et son temps, ed. Pierre Bonniffet and Marie-Thérèse Bouquet-Boyer. Bern: Peter Lang, 1996. 137–52.

‘Noble et grande servante de la musique: Telling the Story of Nadia Boulanger’s Conducting Career.’ Journal of Musicology 14 (1996): 92–116. (Reprint in Soziale Horizonte von Musik: Ein kommentiertes Lesebuch zur Musiksociologie, Bärenreiter-Studienbücher Musik, ed. Christian Kaden and Karsten Mackensen. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2006. 70–91.)

‘La Comtesse de Retz et l’air de cour des années 1570.’ In Le Concert des voix et des instruments à la Renaissance, ed. Jean-Michel Vaccaro. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1995. 299–315.

‘The Fonds Boulanger in the Bibliothèque Nationale.’ Notes 51 (1995): 1227–37.

‘Ronsard, the Lyric Sonnet, and the Late Sixteenth-Century Chanson.’ Early Music History 13 (1994): 65–84.

‘Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac.’ Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 415–68.

‘Jean de Castro, the Pense Partbooks and Musical Culture in Sixteenth-Century Lyons.’ Early Music History 11 (1992): 91–149.

‘“Ses Amours et les miennes tout ensemble”: La Structure cyclique du Premier livre des Amours d’Anthoine de Bertrand.’ Revue de musicologie 74 (1988): 201–220.

‘Influence italienne dans la chanson française des années 1570: Structure mélodique et pratique contrapuntique chez Anthoine de Bertrand.’ Analyse musicale 13 (1988): 45–50.

Dictionaries, Textbooks and Encyclopedias

‘France, 1560–1600.’ In European Music 1520–1640, ed. James Haar. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006. 171–81.

Articles s.v. ‘Musique’ and ‘Chant’ in the Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan. Paris: Champion, 2004.

Articles s.v. ‘Castro, Jean de’; ‘Clereau, Pierre’; ‘Courville, Joachim Thibault de.’ In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, gen. ed. Ludwig Finscher, Personenteil, vol. 2. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000.

Reviews

‘A Cornucopia of Chansons,’ review of five editions of French secular music by Claude Le Jeune, Charles Tessier et al. In Early Music 35 (2007): 303–305.

Christelle Cazaux, La musique à la cour de François I. In Music & Letters 85 (2004): 625–29.

‘Renaissance Repertories,’ compact discs by the Ensemble Clément Janequin and Capilla Flamenca et al. In Early Music 29 (2001): 661–64.

‘Sixteenth-Century French Secular Music.’ Compact discs by Virelai, Ensemble Doulce Mémoire, The King’s Noyse, Phalesius Project and the Newberry Consort. In Early Music 28 (2000): 133–37.

Adrian Le Roy, Psaumes de 1567, ed. Jean-Michel Noailly and Claude Le Jeune; Cent cinquante pseaumes de David, ed. Anne Heider. In Notes 51 (1998): 984–87.

Frank Dobbins, Music in Renaissance Lyons. In The Times Literary Supplement 4649 (8 May 1992): 18.

Hildegard von Bingen, Symphonia harmoniae, ed. Peter van Poucke; Heinrich Isaac, Coralis constantinus, primus tomus, ed. Edward Lerner; and Adrian Willaert et al., Musicque de joye, ed. Samuel Pogue. In Early Music 20 (1992): 349–50.

CD and book reviews for Diapason: nos. 495 (Sept. 2002), 105; 498 (Dec. 2002), 108-9; 503 (May 2003), 120; 510 (Jan. 2004), 22; 513 (Apr. 2004), 115; 514 (May 2004), 122.

Other Publications

‘In honour of François Lesure.’ Preface to Berlioz and Debussy: Sources, Contexts and Legacies, ed. Barbara Kelly and Kerry Murphy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. xv–xix.

English translations of prefaces and critical notes to François Regnard, Intégrale des motets, 4 vols., ed. by Isabelle His, Jean-Pierre Ouvrard, Marc Desmet and Jean-Yves Hameline. Paris and Tours: Salabert/ Centre de Musique Ancienne de Tours, 1995.

Liner notes to Harmonia Mundi CD HMC 901491, Chansons sur des poèmes de Ronsard by the Ensemble Clément Janequin. 1994. Features a number of previously unrecorded works in my editions.

English translations of song texts and composer’s preface to Jean de Castro, Opera omnia, vol. 1, Sonets, avec une chanson . . . livre premier (1592). Chansons, stanses, sonets, et epigrammes . . . livre second (1592) ed. Ignace Bossuyt. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1993.

Jeanice Brooks is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton (UK). She studied vocal performance and music education in the U.S. and in France before completing the PhD in Musicology and French Literature at the Catholic University of America. She taught at Georgetown University (Washington, DC) before arriving at Southampton, and has held visiting appointments at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Melbourne, the University of Toulouse, and the University of Western Australia as well as Harvard University's Houghton Library. In 2021, she will be scholar-in-residence at the Bard Music Festival at Bard College.

Her doctoral dissertation treated musical settings of poetry by the sixteenth-century writer Pierre de Ronsard. Since then she has continued to work on aspects of French music and culture in the Renaissance; her book on the strophic air de cour in the context of court culture, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press, 2000), received the 2001 Roland H. Bainton prize for the best book in music or art history. She also works on twentieth-century French music, especially the career of Nadia Boulanger. She is the author of The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2013); editor of Nadia Boulanger and Her World (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and co-editor of Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music (University of Rochester Press, 2020). She led the Austen Family Music Books digitisation (2015) and current projects explore further topics in domestic music culture in Britain in the years around 1800.

Her articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Review of English Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Early Music History, Early Music, Revue de musicologie, Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Revue belge de musicologie, among others. From 1999 to 2004 she was co-editor of Music & Letters. She has received fellowships and research awards from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the American Musicological Society and the British Academy, and was co-recipient of the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award for the best project combining scholarly research and performance practice. She leads the Sound Heritage network, which brings academic music historians and historical performance practice experts together with professionals from the heritage sector to work collaboratively on research and interpretation of music in historic houses.

Professor Jeanice Brooks
Music Department
Building 2
University of Southampton
Southampton
SO17 1BJ

Room Number: 2/2007

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