Nicholas Mathew

Assistant Professor, Musicology

Research interests: Enlightenment and Romantic music, Beethoven, Haydn, Vienna, music and politics, aesthetics, cultural studies, pianos and performance practice.

Office location: 202 Morrison

Email: nicholas.mathew@berkeley.edu
Office phone: 642-2682

Office hours: M 10-11 and by appt.

Personal statement

I was born in Norwich, in Norfolk, England, and took my first degree at Oxford University, studying the piano concurrently at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. I moved to the US for graduate school, taking my doctorate at Cornell University, where I also studied period pianos with Malcolm Bilson. Before joining Berkeley, I returned to Oxford for three years, as a Junior Research Fellow in Music at Jesus College.

To date, my work has focused on the relationships between music and politics (particularly in Napoleonic Vienna), eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical aesthetics, and the theory and practice of musical performance.  I am co-editor (with W. Dean Sutcliffe) of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music.

Non-majors are most likely to come across me when I teach the department's Western music history survey, or courses on Beethoven, Mozart, or Haydn.  Music majors will encounter me if they audition for the piano performance program or sign up for one of my seminars - generally on eighteenth-century topics, or on broader themes such as music and political life.  Recent graduate seminars have included Music and Politics from Handel to Wagner and Music, Aesthetics, and Political Economy.

Compositions/Performances/Publications

Edited Books

§ (With Benjamin Walton) The Age of Beethoven and Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2010).

Journal Articles

§  “History under Erasure: Wellingtons Sieg, the Congress of Vienna, and the Ruination of Beethoven’s Heroic Style,” The Musical Quarterly 89/1 (Spring 2006).

§  “Beethoven and His Others: Criticism, Difference, and the Composer’s Many Voices,” Beethoven Forum 13/2 (Fall 2006).

§  “Heroic Haydn, the Occasional Work, and ‘Modern Political Music’,” Eighteenth-Century Music 4/1 (March 2007).

§  “Beethoven’s Political Music, the Handelian Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Prostration,” Nineteenth-Century Music 33/2 (Fall 2009).

 

Book Chapters

 

§  “The Presence of Beethoven and Rossini: On Being There in 1824,” in The Age of Beethoven and Rossini, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2010).

Review-Articles

§  “The Tangled Woof,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 134/1 (2009).