Staff

Professor Bennett Zon, DPhil (Oxon), MMus (Edin), BMus (Michigan), HIgher Education Teaching Certificate (Hull)

Head of Department in the Department of Music

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 43151

Contact (email at bennett.zon@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Professor Zon has published The English Plainchant Revival (OUP, 1999); Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Ashgate, 2000); and Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Rochester Press, 2007), a monograph funded in part by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This latter examines the influence of anthropological theories of developmentalism, evolution, individualism and cultural inscription on British perceptions of non-Western music in the long nineteenth century.

Professor Zon is General Editor of the Ashgate book series Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain and in 1997 founded the biennial conference on that topic. He is editor of Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies 2 (Ashgate, 2002), and co-editor of Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies 1 (Ashgate 1999); Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies 3; Nineteenth-Century Music Studies: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference (Ashgate, 2002); and the upcoming Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780-1940: Portrayal of the East (Ashgate, 2007). He has contributed to numerous articles to the second edition of New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Dictionary of National Biography, the Grolier Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era, the Dictionary of 19th Century Journalism, and the New Dictionary of Hymnology.

Professor Zon is founder and General Editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and is founding Director of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Music, Durham University. He is also a founding owner of the Nineteenth-Century JISCmail. Zon is also an active composer, with recent commissions including Military Fanfare (for the King's Division Waterloo Band); Gothic Fragment (for the John Turner Ensemble), and Litany of the Sea (for the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra). He is currently working on a piece called Repercussions, for brass band. He has had numerous performances in America, England, and Europe, both live and on radio, and has been recorded by the Gentlemen of St John's College, Cambridge.

Research Interests

Music theology
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography and aesthetics with particular interest in music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain
Post-Reformation chant and liturgical music

Selected Publications

Books: authored

Zon, BM. 2007. Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press. (Additional information) (View publication online)

Books: edited

Horton P & Zon BM 2006. Nineteenth-Century Music Studies 3. Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Aldershot: Aldershot.
Dibble J & Zon BM 2002. Nineteenth-Century Music Studies 2. Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Samson J & Zon BM 2002. Nineteenth-Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference. Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Essays in edited volumes

Zon, BM 2007. '"Violent passions" and "inhuman excess": Simplicity and the representation of non-Western music in nineteenth-century British travel literature'. In Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s Portrayal of the East. Clayton, M & Zon, BM Aldershot: Ashgate. 209-235. (View publication online)
Zon BM 2006. From 'Very Acute and Plausible' to 'Curiously Misinterpreted': Sir William Jones's 'On the Musical Modes of the Hindus' (1792) and its Reception in Later Musical Treatises. In Romantic Representations of British India. Franklin, Michael London: Routledge. 197-219. (View publication online)
Zon, Bennett. 2006. ‘From “incomprehensibility” to “meaning”: Transcription and Representation of Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology'. and Ethnomusicology’. In Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Ninteenth-Century British Music. Cowgill, Rachel. & Rushton, Julian. Aldershot: Ashgate. 185-199. (Additional information)
Zon BM 2002. Creation/Evolution: Metaphoric Syntheses in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Music Historiography in Britain. In Nineteenth-Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference. Samson J & Zon BM Aldershot: Ashgate. 314-331.

Monographs

Zon BM 2000. Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Zon BM 1999. The English Plainchant Revival. Oxford University Press.

Journal papers: academic

Zon, B 2009. ‘“Loathsome London” Henry Davey’s History of English Music (1895) and the anti-urban socialist utopianism of Ruskin and Morris’. Victorian Literature and Culture 37(2): 359-75.
Zon, B 2009. ‘From great man to fittest survivor: Reputation, recapitulation and survival in Victorian concepts of Wagner’s genius’. Musicae Scientiae 2009-2010: 415-445.
Zon, Bennett 2009. The Evolution of C. Hubert H. Parry’s Evolution of the Art of Music. Victorian Review 68-72.
Zon, BM 2006. ''More than the sum of the life of its several parts': Individual differences in the psychology and ethnomusicology of C. S. Myers’. Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Zon BM 2006. 'Disorienting Race: Humanizing the Musical Savage and the Rise of British Ethnomusicology'. Nineteenth-Century Music Review 3(1): 25-43. (View publication online)
Zon BM 2005. 'Mahler's Liszt and the Hermeneutics of Chant'. Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 46(3-4): 383-402. (View publication online)

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