Project team

Professor Deborah Mawer (Principal Investigator)

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

Deborah Mawer (Principal Investigator) is Research Professor of Music and Co-Director of the French Music Research Hub at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. She is an international specialist in twentieth-century French music, especially Ravel, Les Six and Jolivet, as well as in music-dance and classical-jazz interactions. Her six books comprise three monographs and three sole-edited books, including French Music and Jazz in Conversation: From Debussy to Brubeck (Cambridge, 2014) and Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860-1960 (Routledge, 2018). 

Research has been funded by the AHRC, British Academy, Music & Letters Trust, Music Analysis Development Fund, L’Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique (Canada) and the Royal Musical Association. Mawer acts as a reader for many international journals and publishers, and has been an appointed referee for the European Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and is in demand for pre-performance talks, including at Glyndebourne.

Professor Barbara Kelly (Co-Investigator)

Royal Northern College of Music

Barbara L. Kelly is Professor of Music and Director of Research at the Royal Northern College of Music. Herresearch is focused on French music between 1870 and 1939. She has published two monographs: Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913-1939 (Boydell, 2014) and Tradition and Style in the works of Darius Milhaud (Ashgate, 2003), and two edited collections. She is currently preparing an edited collection with Christopher Moore: and is working on a study of concert societies devoted to new music in France; she is also preparing a study of singer Jane Bathori’s wartime concerts at the Vieux Colombier.

Professor Graham Sadler (Co-Investigator)

Graham Sadler is a research professor at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and emeritus professor of music at the University of Hull. Among his publications on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music are critical editions of three Rameau operas as part of the Jean-Philippe Rameau: Opera Omnia(Kassel: Bärenreiter/Société Jean-Philippe Rameau). His books include French Baroque Opera: A Reader (with Caroline Wood, Ashgate, 2000; revised 2nd edition, Routledge, 2017), The Rameau Compendium (The Boydell Press, 2014; revised 2nd edition, 2017) and Rameau, entre art et science (co-edited with Sylvie Bouissou and Solveig Serre, École des Chartes, 2016).

Dr Rachel Moore (Research Fellow)

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire/St Peter’s College, Oxford

Rachel Moore is a Research Fellow on the ‘Accenting the Classics’ project, and Lecturer and Tutor in Music at St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on music and culture during the First World War, with a particular emphasis on musical exchange between France and the UK and questions of transnational ‘Allied’ identity. She has published widely on French music publishing during the war, including a monograph entitled Performing Propaganda: Musical Life and Culture in Paris, 1914–1918 (Boydell, 2018). Rachel is also project manager for the research project, ‘The London Stage 1800–1900’, based at New College, Oxford.

Project Advisory Panel

Professor Katharine Ellis (University of Cambridge)
Professor Denis Herlin (IReMus, CNRS, Paris)
Professor Michael J. Puri (University of Virginia)