Nicholas Baragwanath is a British

music theorist Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music. '' The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the " rudiments", that ...

musicologist Musicology is the academic, research-based study of music, as opposed to musical composition or performance. Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, f ...

and

pianist A pianist ( , ) is a musician who plays the piano. A pianist's repertoire may include music from a diverse variety of styles, such as traditional classical music, jazz piano, jazz, blues piano, blues, and popular music, including rock music, ...

. He is currently Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham. He is best known for his contributions to the compositional theory and practice of 19th-century

Italian Opera Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous ope ...

. He regularly writes and presents for

BBC Radio 3 BBC Radio 3 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It replaced the BBC Third Programme in 1967 and broadcasts classical music and opera, with jazz, world music, Radio drama, drama, High culture, culture and the arts ...

Education

Baragwanath trained as a pianist at the

Royal Academy of Music The Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London, England, is one of the oldest music schools in the UK, founded in 1822 by John Fane and Nicolas-Charles Bochsa. It received its royal charter in 1830 from King George IV with the support of the firs ...

and, under

Ryszard Bakst Ryszard Bakst (4 April 1926 – 25 March 1999) was a Polish pianist and distinguished piano teacher. Background Bakst was a descendant of the Russian artist Léon Bakst. His teachers were initially his mother and pianist Józef Turczyńsk ...

, at the

Royal Northern College of Music The Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) is a conservatoire located in Manchester, England. It is one of four conservatoires associated with the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. In addition to being a centre of music education ...

. In 1998, he completed his MA and D.Phil at the

University of Sussex The University of Sussex is a public university, public research university, research university located in Falmer, East Sussex, England. It lies mostly within the city boundaries of Brighton and Hove. Its large campus site is surrounded by the ...

and lectured at the

University of Wellington Victoria University of Wellington (), also known by its shorter names "VUW" or "Vic", is a public research university in Wellington, New Zealand. It was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a constituent college of the University ...

, New Zealand. In 2001, Baragwanath moved to the Royal Northern College of Music to become Head of Postgraduate Studies and later became the Dean of Research and Enterprise. Since 2010, he has taught at the

University of Nottingham The University of Nottingham is a public research university in Nottingham, England. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter in 1948. Nottingham's main campus (University Park Campus, Nottingh ...

.University of Nottingham
Faculty Profile

Research on 19th century Italian Opera and 18th century pedagogy

Baragwanath's research into the Italian traditions of 19th century Opera has revised opinions as to how composition was learned by composers by offering a detailed analysis of the methods of the Italian conservatories, notably in

Naples Naples ( ; ; ) is the Regions of Italy, regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 908,082 within the city's administrative limits as of 2025, while its Metropolitan City of N ...

and Northern Italy. These historical Italian methods of composition, grounded in solfeggio,

partimento A partimento (from the Italian: ''partimento'', plural ''partimenti'') is a sketch (often a bass line), written out on a single staff, whose main purpose is to be a guide for the improvisation ("realization") of a composition at the keyboard. A ...

and

counterpoint In music theory, counterpoint is the relationship of two or more simultaneous musical lines (also called voices) that are harmonically dependent on each other, yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. The term originates from the Latin ...

, offer an alternative method of analysis of Italian Opera to the standard Austro-German tradition. Baragwanath's latest book on the solfeggio tradition provides the first major study of the fundamentals of eighteenth-century music education. It recovers an entirely forgotten art of melody that allowed musicians to develop exceptional skills in improvisation, composition, and score-reading.

Books

* ''The Italian Traditions and Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Opera'' (2011). Indiana University Press. * ''The Solfeggio Tradition: A Forgotten Art of Melody in the Long Eighteenth Century'' (2020). Oxford University Press.

Awards

* Westrup Prize (2006) - ''Musicology and Critical Theory: The Case of Wagner, Adorno, and Horkheimer''.Music & Letters
Westrup Prize * Marjorie Weston Emerson Award (2014) - ''Mozart’s early chamber music with keyboard: traditions of performance, composition and commodification'' in Mozart’s Chamber Music with Keyboard, edited by Martin Harlow (Cambridge, 2012).Mozart Society of America
Marjorie Weston Emerson Award

References

Bibliography

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External links

Nicholas Baragwanath
Faculty page at University of Nottingham. * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Baragwanath, Nicholas 20th-century British musicologists Academics of the University of Nottingham Academic staff of Victoria University of Wellington Alumni of the Royal Academy of Music Alumni of the Royal Northern College of Music Alumni of the University of Sussex British music theorists Music theorists 21st-century British musicologists Living people Year of birth missing (living people)