Roger Hansford
Roger Hansford holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Southampton. He has taught on university music history courses and delivered research papers at academic conferences throughout the UK. His research interests revolve around nineteenth-century romanticism, particularly music in nineteenth-century Britain and its cultural context.
Subjects: Music
Biography
Roger gained First Class Honours, as well as winning the Edward Wood Memorial Prize for being the best student in his undergraduate cohort at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He continues to be enthused by topics he studied at BA level, including music performance, history and analysis of music, ethnomusicology, and music pedagogy. He holds a Post-Graduate Certificate in music education, and gained distinction for his MMus in Musicology, including the analytical project ‘Narrative Structure in Chopin’s Ballades: Large-scale Romantic Works and the “Problem” of Sonata Form’. His doctoral research attracted funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Whilst at University of Southampton, Roger was among the early supporters of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research, a guest speaker for the Polish Society on the 200th anniversary commemoration of Frédéric Chopin’s life and works in 2010, and a teaching assistant for the undergraduate course ‘Materials of Music History, 1500-1900’. Since 2012, he has presented papers at conferences across the UK, including the Biennial Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, the Biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and at University of Southampton’s ‘Other Voices Study Day’ and 'Reform' Conferences. He is a member of the Editorial Board for 'Romance, Revolution and Reform', the Journal of the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research. In 2020, Roger was awarded the Stephen Copley Research Award by the British Association for Romantic Studies.
Personal Interests
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Roger grew up in the Southampton area in a home where music and literature were integral to family life. A Grade 8 pianist, he is also a qualified teacher and a church musician. He has been inspired as a writer by his family and friends, and he won both local and national writing competitions from an early age. Through his father – a published poet and a public librarian – Roger developed an interest in history studies and his local community, publishing his first local studies book with The History Press in 2014. In 2019, he published his great-grandfather's memoirs, detailing working-class life in early twentieth-century Britain.
Websites
Amazon.com
Romance, Revolution and Reform, the Journal of the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research
Waterstones
Books
Articles
Intersection in Music and Literary Studies
Published: Nov 18, 2020 by Philament 26: Bodies of Work
Authors: Roger Hansford
Subjects:
Literature, Film and Video, English Language & Linguistics, Media and Cultural Studies, Gender & Intersectionality Studies, Art & Visual Culture
Intersectional approaches to musicological investigations, as employed in my 2017 Routledge monograph, 'Figures of the Imagination', are integral to the postmodernist turn in musicology and can expand the scope of future research. This article discusses how researchers and analysts might treat music reflexively with film, visual art, sculpture, or literary and dramatic works to reach meaningful conclusions.
Review: Phyllis Weliver 'Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism'
Published: Jan 15, 2020 by 'Romance, Revolution and Reform' Issue 2 'Resistance in the Long-Nineteenth Century'
Authors: Roger Hansford
Subjects:
History, Music, English Language & Linguistics
This is a review of Phyllis Weliver's recent book on liberalism in the high Victorian salon.
Review: Bennet Zon 'Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture'
Published: Apr 11, 2019 by 'Romance, Revolution and Reform' Issue 1 'Regionalism Across the World in the Nineteenth Century'
Authors: Roger
Subjects:
Literature, Music, Religion
Bennett Zon's 'Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture' (2017) is a well-structured monograph that immerses the reader in an array of nineteenth-century literary and musical texts. By drawing Victorian theories of evolution into musicology, Zon expands our knowledge of the period and attempts to explain Victorian Britain's enduring reputation as a music culture on the defensive.
Defining the Multicultural Moment
Published: Nov 01, 2010 by Emergence: Faculty of Humanities Postgraduate Research Journal
Authors: Roger Hansford
Subjects:
Music
An analysis of the yangqin performance, "The Rain Falls on the Leaves of the Banana Tree" as a cultural fusion in terms of its musical elements, cultural context, and the organology of the yangqin played by Lily Yuan as part of the 1990 Lyrichord Discs album, "The Ancient Art Music of China".