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.

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 30s 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.

Selected Publications

• ‘Mimetic Mechanicity: The Iron Foundry and Vernacular Internationalism in the 1930s’, Twentieth-Century Music (2023), https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572222000433
• ‘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