J. P. E. Harper-Scott

J. P. E. Harper-Scott (born 3 December 1977^[1]) is a British musicologist and formerly Professor of Music History and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London.^[2] He is a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'Music in Context'.^[3]

Education and employment

John Paul Edward Harper-Scott was born in Easington, County Durham. He was educated at Shotton Hall Comprehensive School, and received an undergraduate degree at Durham University.^[4] He subsequently received a D.Phil at the University of Oxford in 2004, for a thesis "Elgar's musical language : analysis, hermeneutics, humanity".^[5] He worked at the University of Nottingham and the University of Liverpool before moving to Royal Holloway, University of London.^[6] In September 2021, Harper-Scott announced his resignation from Royal Holloway over dissatisfaction with the increasing politicisation of music in academia and attempts to 'decolonise' the curriculum.^{[citation needed]}

Scholarship

Known for his work on musical modernism, he has argued that Edward Elgar should be considered 'a subtle and important harbinger of twentieth-century modernism'.^[7] He has also established a link between techniques of music analysis and the theories of Jacques Lacan.^[8] According to Lawrence Kramer, Harper-Scott's The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism poses a challenge to musicology: he writes that 'the book is a sweeping indictment of musicology and a manifesto for its transformation. Its core thesis is that musicology today is mired in a neoliberal late-Capitalist swamp from which it blindly ignores "our most pressing present concern – to escape the horrors of the present by imagining the transformations of a coming society".'^[9] One result of his work is that ideology critique, traditionally associated in musicology with the philosopher Adorno (1903–69), 'has a significant role to play in the future of the discipline'.^[10]

Bibliography

As author

• Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
• Elgar: an Extraordinary Life (London: Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 2007).
• The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Ideology in Britten's Operas (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

As editor

• Elgar Studies, edited with Julian Rushton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• An Introduction to Music Studies, edited with Jim Samson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).