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Biography
Dr Joanne Cormac is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. Her £1.1million fellowship project is entitled The Cultural Legacies of the British Empire: Classical Music's Colonial History (1750-1900). Joanne is also a Visiting Fellow at UCL's Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Joanne concurrently holds a prestigious Nottingham Research Fellowship to support her work on a transnational history of the nineteenth-century symphony. 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 global history, imperialism, travel, transnationalism, and cultural exchange. She explores these themes in her NRF project on the symphony in the long 19th century, and in her FLF project on music in the British Empire. She also specialises in the music of Franz Liszt (especially the symphonic poems and issues around genre), and 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, empire, romanticism, programme music, the symphony, travel and transnationalism, and biography.
Research Summary
I am currently working on two projects. The first is my UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship project entitled The Cultural Legacies of the British Empire: Classical Music's Colonial History… read more
Selected Publications
Current Research
I am currently working on two projects. The first is my UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship project entitled The Cultural Legacies of the British Empire: Classical Music's Colonial History (1750-1900). This project attempts to situate the development of Western Classical music in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries within broader global histories of imperialism, colonialism, and enslavement, specifically within the British Empire. The project examines how the profits of colonialism and slavery underpinned Britain's musical infrastructure; it places at its centre the performances and perspectives of enslaved and colonised musicians that shaped Western Classical music, as well as exploring the non-Western origins of the instruments, genres, and dances that are normalised within it; and it unravels the patterns of imperial trade underpinning the movements of musicians, musical ideas, and artefacts.
My second 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. As part of the project, I am also building a database of performances of symphonies in Western Europe and North America, and a mobile app enabling users to make their own arrangements of movements from Beethoven's symphonies in the spirit of a nineteenth-century arranger.
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