Dr Giles Masters

Background

After undergraduate and masters studies at the University of Oxford, I received my PhD from King’s College London in 2021. Before joining Magdalen in 2022, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Nottingham.

During 2024/25, I will be on temporary leave from my position at Magdalen to work as a Lecturer in Music at King’s College London.

Research

I am a historical musicologist specialising in twentieth-century music, cultural politics, and institutional history. In the broadest terms, I aim in my work to show how transnational perspectives can deepen our understanding of the relationship between, on the one hand, ideas, practices, and networks pertaining to music, and, on the other, the profound cultural, social, and political transformations of the twentieth century, particularly as regards geopolitics. To date, my research has focused primarily on the festivals organised in the 1920s and 1930s by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) – events which offer an unrivalled lens for re-examining the conjuncture of modernism and internationalism in European musical culture.

At Magdalen, I have developed my work on music and international relations by co-organising the conference ‘Music and Diplomacy in the Long Twentieth Century’, which included speakers from UC Berkeley, the University of Edinburgh, Freiburg University, and Paris-Saclay University, as well as participants from six different departments at Oxford. The artist Jasmina Cibic gave a public lecture and film screening, and led a student workshop on soft power, international organisations, and the politics of curation.

My other interests include childhood studies, music education, and public engagement. Since summer 2023, I have been working with Felicity Newby-Smith (Learning and Participation Manager, Music at Oxford) and an interdisciplinary team of artists and workshop leaders to develop Let’s Build a Town!, a collaborative music-theatre project for young people aged 8–10. Produced by the Cultural Programme (University of Oxford) – and with additional support from the Faculty of Music, Magdalen’s Access and Outreach Team, and the Marchus Trust – the workshops and rehearsals will take place mainly at St Francis CofE Primary School in east Oxford, a school linked to Magdalen through the Oxford Hub’s primary school twinning programme. The project will culminate in a public performance in March 2025.

In 2024, I was awarded the Jerome Roche Prize by the Royal Musical Association for ‘an outstanding article by a scholar in the early stages of their career’. My research has been supported by organisations including the Music & Letters Trust and the New York Public Library.

Selected Publications

• ‘New Music’s “World Brain”: Technocratic Internationalism at the ISCM Festival’, in Sonic Circulations 1900–60: Music, Modernism, and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Emily MacGregor, Emily I. Dolan, and Arman Schwartz(University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming)
• ‘Mimetic Mechanicity: The Iron Foundry and Vernacular Internationalism in the 1930s’, Twentieth-Century Music 21/1 (2024), 74–109, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572222000433 [awarded the RMA’s Jerome Roche Prize 2024]
• ‘Performing Internationalism: The ISCM as a “Musical League of Nations”’, in ‘Round Table: “A Musical League of Nations”?: Music Institutions and the Politics of Internationalism between the Wars’, ed. Sarah Collins, Barbara L. Kelly, and Laura Tunbridge, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 147/2 (2022), 560–71, https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.25
• Review of Opera in Postwar Venice: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde, by Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Opera Quarterly 36/1–2 (2021), 113–20, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbab002