I’m Henry and, currently, I am training for ordained ministry in the Church of England. I spent the first two years of training at the College of the Resurrection in Mirfield, where I finished my course of studies in summer 2020 with a short dissertation on Mechthild von Magdeburg’s theology of lament. For my final year of ordination training, I’m now based at Ripon College Cuddesdon (Oxfordshire) where I hope to broaden my encounter with the Church of England and delve more deeply into the rich diversity of theological study before embarking on a curacy in summer 2021.
Before beginning my formation for the priesthood, I held posts as a University teacher and researcher in musicology. Between 2016 and 2018, I was postdoctoral ‘Assistent’ to Prof. Dr. Cristina Urchueguía at the University of Bern’s Institut für Musikwissenschaft. During my time in Bern, I was able to host two wonderfully engaging workshops on two fascinating medieval song books: the Bern chansonnier and the Codex Buranus, with volumes deriving from both conferences currently in progress.
Previously, I held posts as Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at Oxford for three years, at two of the University’s most beautiful colleges: Magdalen College (October 2013–June 2016), and New College (October 2015–July 2016). In this capacity, I taught the colleges’ fantastic undergraduate students on a range of different topics, from Guillaume de Machaut through to Viennese Modernism, and from Analysis to Musical Thought and Scholarship. I was also able to offer a seminar on music-related sources held at the Bodleian Library together with my colleague Dr Eleanor Giraud, and lead a presentation-technique seminar for Master’s students at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Music. I much enjoyed teaching and have benefitted tremendously from the insightful questions of students (and made a number of good friends, too!). I am very keen to engage with educational research and was recognised as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in summer 2015.
In my own studies, I was fortunate enough to have been supervised by two wonderful mentors: Prof. Elizabeth Eva Leach, and Prof. Dr. Franz Körndle. I carried out my doctoral research on the musical representation of Minnesang in roughly contemporary manuscripts and its subsequent academic construction (supervised by Prof. Leach) in the supportive, welcoming, and invigorating environment of Merton College, Oxford: a place with which I still maintain a very strong connection. Previously, I completed a Magister Artium degree at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar. This dissertation (supervised by Prof. Dr. Körndle) re-evaluated a medieval music manuscript from the former Franciscan monastery at Vienna, now held in Krakow (MS Mus. 40580), which had not been studied since the early 20th century. Driven by a study of the manuscript’s contents, I scrutinised the historiographical problems generated by assertions of musical ‘atavism’.
During my earlier studies in Weimar (2005–2008), I also undertook some research on Johann Gottfried Herder’s music aesthetics: a philosopher often neglected by musicologists in favour of Immanuel Kant. Guided by the cultural historian Prof. Dr. Michael Maurer, I gained an overview of Herder’s complex ideas about music. I studied how these were received by academics in the 20th century and by the contrasting schools of West German and GDR musicology in particular, and have pondered the reliance of Herder’s conceptualisation of church songs and their function on the ideas expressed by Martin Luther.
So, in a nutshell, my musicological interests can be outlined very broadly by the following keywords (though they are certainly not limited to them!): historiography, the history of musicology, GDR musicology, the Middle Ages, vernacular song, early polyphony, Johann Gottfried Herder, interdisciplinarity, …
If you want to find out more about my academic background and/or research interests, feel free to browse my various blog posts, or simply drop me a line!
Musicology in the Making 