Jonathan Cross - Biography#

The scholarship of Jonathan Cross focuses on issues in musical modernism, twentieth-century and contemporary music, and theory and analysis. His publications include The Stravinsky Legacy (1998), which examines the impact of Stravinsky’s work on his contemporaries and successors; The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky (2003); and a critical biography of Igor Stravinsky (2015); and two volumes on the work of British composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music (2000) and Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus (2009). He has made major contributions to the development of music analysis in the UK over a 30-year period, becoming Associate Editor (1994–99) and Editor (2000–2004) of the journal Music Analysis, and now serving on the Advisory Board. He was Director of the 5th European Music Analysis Conference at the University of Bristol (2002), the first and only time this event has been held in the UK.

He is on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of: Tempo, Analysis in Context (Leuven Studies in Musicology), and the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie; he is also an Associate Editor and Member of the Editorial Board of Grove Music Online; and is Editor-in-Chief of the New Grove Dictionary of Music Theory and Analysis (in progress with Oxford University Press).

Alongside his academic work, he is committed to speaking on a broad range of musical topics that engage with the interests of the wider public, including frequent appearances at English National Opera, Glyndebourne, the BBC Proms, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Bath Bach and Mozart Festivals, the Barbican Centre, New Music Scotland, and for the Philharmonia, Scottish Chamber and BBC Symphony Orchestras. He was a regular speaker at the London Southbank Centre’s award-winning 'The Rest is Noise Festival' during 2013, and was the resident musicologist at 'Listen to the 20th Century' at the Singapore International Festival of Arts in September 2014. He is Series Consultant to the Philharmonia Orchestra's 2016 Stravinsky series, and is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 3. In 2015–16 he is Research Associate at IRCAM, Paris, where he is investigating the history, practices and reception of French spectral music.