Joanne Cormac

Contact

• workRoom B05 Department of Music
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• work01159514759
• Joanne.Cormac@nottingham.ac.uk

Biography

Dr Joanne Cormac is a Nottingham Research Fellow and is soon to take up a £1.1million UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship on a project entitled The Cultural Legacies of the British Empire: Classical Music's Colonial History (1750-1900). From 2015-2021 she was a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. She has also held Visiting Scholarships at Wolfson College, University of Oxford (2017-18) and Georgetown University, Washington DC (2018). From 2013-15 she was a Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University. She studied Music at the University of Nottingham (BA) and at the University of Birmingham (MMus and PhD).

Expertise Summary

Joanne's research interests include 19th-century music and culture and the digital humanities, with particular interests in travel, transnationalism, and cultural exchange. She explores these themes in her NRF project on the symphony in the long 19th century, and in her new project on music in the British Empire. She also specialises in the music of Franz Liszt (especially the symphonic poems), and is interested in music and life-writing, and its impact of historiography and reception (the subject of her Leverhulme Fellowship).

Teaching Summary

Joanne's teaching interests include, romanticism, programme music, the symphony, opera, popular theatre, and biography. During the academic year 2017-18 she taught the module 19th-Century Composer… read more

Research Summary

My current project, entitled The Symphony: Transnationalism, Networks, and Cultural Exchange in the Long Nineteenth Century is funded by a Nottingham Research Fellowship. The project attempts a… read more

Selected Publications

• JOANNE CORMAC, 2017. Liszt and the Symphonic Poem Cambridge University Press.
• 2020. Between Beethoven and Mendelssohn: Biographical Constructions of Berlioz in the London Press 19th-Century Music. 44(2), 80-99
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2020. Introduction: 19th-Century Music Special Issue on Music and Biography. 19th-Century Music. 44(2), 61-66
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2019. Intertextuality, Subjectivity, and Meaning in Liszt’s Deux Polonaises The Musical Quarterly.

• View all publications

Joanne's teaching interests include, romanticism, programme music, the symphony, opera, popular theatre, and biography. During the academic year 2017-18 she taught the module 19th-Century Composer Biographies.

Current Research

My current project, entitled The Symphony: Transnationalism, Networks, and Cultural Exchange in the Long Nineteenth Century is funded by a Nottingham Research Fellowship. The project attempts a transnational history of one of Europe's most politicized cultural exports: the symphony. It argues that travel, transnational exchange, and dissemination through networks, shaped the development of the symphony in ways not previously understood. Historical narratives of the symphony have long been organized around units of nations. However, musicians, conductors, and symphonies crossed geopolitical boundaries, as often as they reinforced them. My book unravels how meanings (both aesthetic and political), performance practices, and compositional styles changed as a result of travel and cultural exchange.

Past Research

My Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship interrogated the role of biography in musicological scholarship and reception studies. The findings are available in journal articles in The Musical Quarterly, The Journal of Musicological Research and in a special issue I guest edited for 19th-Century Music.

My first monograph, Liszt and the Symphonic Poem (Cambridge University Press, 2017) was awarded the Alan Walker Triennial Prize 2020 of the American Liszt Society. It offered a long-overdue examination of Liszt's vastly influential, but misunderstood and much-maligned, genre. Using contextual, philosophical, and musical evidence, Joanne tackled the thorny question: what is a symphonic poem? I overturned the traditional view that positions the symphonic poems as alternatives to the symphony post-Beethoven. In contrast, I returned these influential pieces to their original performance context in the theatre, arguing that the symphonic poem is as much a dramatic as a symphonic genre.

Reviews

'I believe Liszt and the Symphonic Poem is a game-changer for our understanding of Liszt as a dramatic composer … beautifully written and meticulously researched.' R. Larry Todd Source: Official citation for the 2020 Alan Walker Triennial Book Award, The American Liszt Society

'… a richly detailed interdisciplinary study'

Patrick Rucker Source: Gramophone Magazine

• JOANNE CORMAC, 2024. Franz Liszt. In: DAVID TRIPPETT, ed., Wagner in Context
• JOANNE CORMAC, ed., 2021. Liszt in Context Cambridge University Press.
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2020. Introduction: 19th-Century Music Special Issue on Music and Biography. 19th-Century Music. 44(2), 61-66
• 2020. Between Beethoven and Mendelssohn: Biographical Constructions of Berlioz in the London Press 19th-Century Music. 44(2), 80-99
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2019. Intertextuality, Subjectivity, and Meaning in Liszt’s Deux Polonaises The Musical Quarterly.
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2018. Cinematic Depictions of Music Creative Processes in Classical and Popular Music. In: NICOLAS DONIN, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Creative Process in Music
• JOANNE CORMAC, ed., 2017. 30-Second Classical Music Ivy Press.
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2017. Liszt and the Symphonic Poem Cambridge University Press.
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2017. From Satirical Piece to Commercial Product: the Mid-Victorian Opera Burlesque and its Bourgeois Audience Journal of the Royal Musical Association. 142(1), 69-108
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2014. Orpheus: the Opera Liszt Never Wrote. In: JAMES DEAVILLE and MICHAEL SAFFLE, eds., Liszt’s Legacies Pendragon Press. 171-197
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2013. Liszt, Language and Identity: a Multi-National Chameleon 19th-Century Music. 36(3), 231-47
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2013. From Tragedy to Melodrama: Rethinking Liszt’s Hamlet Nineteenth-Century Music Review. 10(1), 29-55
• JOANNE CORMAC, 2013. Revising Hamlet: the Symphonic Poem in the Theatre Studia Musicologica. 54(1), 35-48
• JOANNE CORMAC, Death and Resurrection Motifs in Narratives of Berlioz’s and Liszt’s Lives: D’Ortigue, Ramann, and Berlioz’s Mémoires Journal of Musicological Research.
• JOANNE CORMAC, English Cosmopolitanism and Postcolonial Anxiety: the Symphony in 19th-century New York. In: Musical Crossroads Transcript. (In Press.)
• JOANNE CORMAC, Regionalising the Nation: The Symphonies of Franz Lachner and Emilie Mayer in Relationship to German National Identity Journal of the American Musicological Society. 78(2), (In Press.)