Nicholas Baragwanath is a British

music theorist Music theory is the study of 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 are needed to understand music notation (ke ...

musicologist Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some mu ...

and

pianist A pianist ( , ) is an individual musician who plays the piano. Since most forms of Western music can make use of the piano, pianists have a wide repertoire and a wide variety of styles to choose from, among them traditional classical music, ja ...

. 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 born 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 ...

. 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 the oldest conservatoire 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 first Duke of ...

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 , mottoeng = Be Still and Know , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £14.4 million (2020) , budget = £319.6 million (2019–20) , chancellor = Sanjeev Bhaskar , vice_chancellor = Sasha Roseneil , ...

and lectured at the University of Wellington, 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 university, public research university in Nottingham, United Kingdom. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter in 1948. The University of Nottingham belongs t ...

.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 (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...

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, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradi ...

, 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 Music theorists 20th-century British musicologists British music theorists 21st-century musicologists Living people Year of birth missing (living people)