Professor Jeanice Brooks

Professor Jeanice Brooks is a cultural historian of music, and Professor of Music at the University of Southampton.

My research 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. I hold a PhD in musicology with a minor in French literature, and continue to develop interdisciplinary research topics that draw on literary as well as musical sources. My research on domestic music performance and material culture includes projects in collaboration with the National Trust and other heritage bodies.

My 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. My work on Nadia Boulanger has led to two recent 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). In early music, my 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. I am currently co-editing the Renaissance volume of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Western Music (forthcoming 2023). I have published articles 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 I was co-editor of Music & Letters, and I led the digital edition of the Austen Family Music Books in 2015.