J. P. E. Harper-Scott (born 3 December 1977[1]) is a British musicologist and formerly Professor of Music History and Theory at
Royal Holloway, University of London.[2] He is a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'Music in Context'.[3]
Known for his work on musical modernism, he has argued that
Edward Elgar should be considered 'a subtle and important harbinger of twentieth-century modernism'.[7] He has also established a link between techniques of music analysis and the theories of
Jacques Lacan.[8] According to
Lawrence Kramer, Harper-Scott's The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism poses a challenge to musicology: he writes that 'the book is a sweeping indictment of
musicology and a manifesto for its transformation. Its core thesis is that musicology today is mired in a
neoliberal late-Capitalist swamp from which it blindly ignores "our most pressing present concern – to escape the horrors of the present by imagining the transformations of a coming society".'[9] One result of his work is that
ideology critique, traditionally associated in musicology with the philosopher
Adorno (1903–69), 'has a significant role to play in the future of the discipline'.[10]
Bibliography
As author
Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Elgar: an Extraordinary Life (London: Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 2007).
The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Ideology in Britten's Operas (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
As editor
Elgar Studies, edited with
Julian Rushton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
An Introduction to Music Studies, edited with Jim Samson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
^Jeremy Begbie, 'Confidence and Anxiety in Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius"', in Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Martin Clarke (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, p. 202
^David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, eds, Musicology: The Key Concepts, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 211.
^Lawrence Kramer, The Thought of Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), p. 3
^Jonathan Hicks, 'Musicology for Art Historians', in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, edited by Tim Sheppard and Anne Leonard (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), p. 41
Secondary sources
Beard, David, and Gloag, Kenneth, eds, Musicology: The Key Concepts, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
Begbie, Jeremy, 'Confidence and Anxiety in Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius"', in Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Martin Clarke (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 197–214.
Hicks, Jonathan, 'Musicology for Art Historians', in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, edited by Tim Sheppard and Anne Leonard (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 35–42.
Kramer, Lawrence, The Thought of Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).