James Davies
Assistant Professor, Musicology
Research interests: cultural performance, singers and voice, keyboard practice, anthropologies of listening, colonial melodrama, history of science, nineteenth-century physiology and sciences of the mind
Office location: 226 Morrison
Email: jqd@berkeley.edu
Office phone: 643-6233
Office hours: Th 2-3
Personal statement
I was born in Cape Town, taking my first degree (majoring in performance) in Johannesburg. As a post-graduate, I worked at Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge, where I was later Junior Research Fellow in Music. I have published on such topics as colonial melodrama, diva-concepts, aging castrati, musical gift albums, histories of pianistic touch, township opera and danced Beethoven symphonies. My latest research involves the cultural history of performance in European cosmopolitan capitals around 1830.
Currently, I am exploring ways in which musicology might engage with historians of science in thinking about questions of physiology, neurology and physiognomy in musical performance. My book project, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, attempts to shift musicological study of the 1830s away from its fixation with ‘Ideal Romanticism’ and towards ‘Material Romanticism.’ Pointing out the importance of scientific endeavor to the social practice of music in this era, I suggest that the common (romantic) view of Romantic Music as seeking only transcendence, spirituality, other-worldliness or emotional overcoming is overstated. More specifically, I am working towards a cultural history of hands (particularly keyboard-playing hands) and voice (in relation to disciplines of vocal production) mostly in Paris and London.
Compositions/Performances/Publications
Publications
"Gautier's Diva: The First French Use of the Word," The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2009).
"Reflecting on Reflex, or, Another Touching New Fact about Chopin," Keyboard Perspectives (forthcoming in 2009)
“Julia’s Gift: the social life of scores, ca. 1830,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2006), awarded the Jerome Roche Prize in 2007.
“Melodramatic Possessions: South Africa, The Flying Dutchman and the Imperial Stage,” The Opera Quarterly (2005).
“’Veluti in Speculum’ the twilight of the castrato,” Cambridge Opera Journal (2005).
“Dancing the Symphonic: Beethoven-Bochsa’s Symphonie pastorale” in 19th-Century Music (2003).