Researchers

Dr Anastasia Belina

Dr Anastasia Belina is a musicologist, writer, presenter, and opera director, who presented and published on a wide range of her research interests. She is the author of Die tägliche Mühe ein Mensch zu sein (Wolke Verlag, 2013), and A Musician Divided: André Tchaikowsky in His Own Words (Toccata Classics, 2013).  She is co-editor of Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands: Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives (Ashgate, 2013), to which she also contributed a chapter on Sergey Taneyev and his interest in Wagner.  With Derek B. Scott she co-edited The Business of Opera (Ashgate, 2015). She has written and presented talks, lectures, and conference papers on André Tchaikowsky, Sergey Taneyev, Anton Rubinstein, Russian and Soviet music, nineteenth-century opera, Wagner and his influences on Russian composers, and modern operas written on Greek dramas.

She was instrumental in bringing André Tchaikowsky’s opera The Merchant of Venice to the stage, and was commissioned to write A Musician Divided: André Tchaikowsky in His Own Words (Toccata Classics, 2013) by Bregenzer Festspiele. During her research on Tchaikowsky and his life and music she has given a number of interviews for British, German, Austrian, and Polish radio.

She has contributed to the research for, and appeared in, a documentary Rebel of the Keys about the life of André Tchaikowsky, which has been screened in independent cinemas in the UK.

She contributed to the BBC 3 Composer of the Week with Donald Macleod, on a five-part programme dedicated to Sergey Taneyev and his music.

With Tom Service, she discussed André Tchaikowsky and her book A Musician Divided: André Tchaikowsky in His Own Words on Music Matters on BBC 3 in January 2013.

She has been an International Artistic Director of Koncerty Urodzinowe Chopina (Birthday Concerts of Chopin Music Festival), Warsaw, since 2013.

Dr Belina is an Assistant Head of Programmes at the Royal College of Music, London

Professor Derek B. Scott

Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology and Head of the School of Music at the University of Leeds. He researches into music, culture and ideology, and is the author of The Singing Bourgeois (1989, R/2001), From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (2003), Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). He is the editor of Music, Culture, and Society: A Reader (2000), and The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009). He has written numerous articles in which he has been at the forefront in identifying changes of critical perspective in the socio-cultural study of music. He was the General Editor of Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music Series for fifteen years (over 100 books published between 2000 and 2015).

He was a founder member of the UK Critical Musicology Group in 1993 and organizer of their first major conference in 1995. He is, in addition, a composer whose works range from operetta and music theatre to symphonies for brass band. He has a particular interest in the performance of music-hall songs and drawing-room ballads, but has also worked professionally in a variety of capacities on radio and TV, and in concert hall and theatre. His musicological research area is music, culture and ideology. His earlier work examined the commercial popular songs of nineteenth-century Britain and America in the context of social class, nationalism, and imperialism. In later research, he develops methodologies and theoretical models for a critical musicological investigation of how ideology is embedded in musical styles, concentrating on music’s relationship with leading social topics from the past two centuries: gender, sexuality, ethnicity, Orientalism, race, class, and the sacred and profane.

Recent work has focused on cultural history, especially the rise of aesthetic antagonisms between the serious and the entertaining in metropolitan life. He has argued that a popular music revolution occurred in the nineteenth century, when popular styles (operetta, music hall, and such) first began to assert their distinctiveness, especially in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. The legacy of that revolution is still with us today, and he has written on a variety of twentieth-century music, such as jazz, light music and “easy listening,” operetta, musical theatre, and the Eurovision Song Contest. His present research is focused on the productions of German operetta in London and New York during the early twentieth century.