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Dr Christopher Wiley publishes major book chapter on musical biography in Oxford University Press volume

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Dr Christopher Wiley has written a major book chapter on musical biography for a new essay collection published by Oxford University Press, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis.

Dr Wiley’s 12,000-word chapter, entitled ‘Biography and Life-Writing’ (abstract available here), discusses the advent of musical biography, its proliferation in the long nineteenth century, and its legacy up to the present. It includes two case studies: a compilation of anecdotes, to explore how Victorian values were reflected in contemporaneous life-writing; and a collected biography, to investigate the role of women as characters within musical biographies.

Dr Wiley is an internationally acknowledged expert on musical biography, the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and has previously published widely on the subject.

Bibliographic citation

Wiley, Christopher. ‘Biography and Life-Writing’, in Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis eds. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 77–101. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190616922.013.4

Full text

The full text of Dr Wiley’s chapter is available here: https://www.academia.edu/35186914/Biography_and_Life_Writing_Oxford_Handbook_of_Music_and_Intellectual_Culture_in_the_Nineteenth_Century_

Dr Christopher Wiley writes on Dame Ethel Smyth for the OUP Blog

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Ethel SmythDr Christopher Wiley has contributed a text to the OUPblog, Oxford University Presss Academic Insights for the Thinking World, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the death of Dame Ethel Smyth, the pioneering composer and writer, on 8 May 1944.

Dr Wiley’s 1,000-word post, ‘Five facts about Dame Ethel Smyth’, may be read here: http://blog.oup.com/2014/05/facts-dame-ethel-smyth/

This blog entry follows Dr Wiley’s article on Smyth published in Oxford journal The Musical Quarterly last year.

To mark the anniversary, Dr Wiley also organized a lunchtime recital of Smyth’s music which took plan on 8 May 2014 in Woking, the town where she was resident from 1910 until her death.

Update: Dr Wiley’s blog entry was subsequently selected as one of the Editor’s Picks, appearing on the front page of the OUPblog for some weeks.

Dr Christopher Wiley publishes major article in The Musical Quarterly

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The Musical Quarterly Volume 96 Issue 2A major article by Dr Christopher Wiley, ‘Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and “The First Woman to Write an Opera”’ (doi: 10.1093/musqtl/gdt012), has been published in The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 96.

Dr Wiley’s article calls into question the impression of the extent of women’s contributions to music composition given by Smyth’s published literature. He examines the traces of revisionism evident between her earlier and later prose writings, asking whether Smyth may have sought to present herself as essentially unique given her status as a female composer. Dr Wiley also explores the differences between music and literature as professions to which creative women aspired in the early twentieth century, with reference to Smyth’s Female Pipings in Eden and Woolf’s Three Guineas.

Founded in 1915 and published by Oxford University Press, The Musical Quarterly has long been cited as the foremost scholarly musical journal in the United States.

Bibliographic citation

Wiley, Christopher. ‘Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and “The First Woman to Write an Opera”’, The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 263–95. doi: 10.1093/musqtl/gdt012

Full text

The full text is available for free download under licence from Surrey Research Insight Open Access: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/800523/

Update: Dr Wiley’s article reached no.1 in The Musical Quarterly’s monthly ranking of most-read articles (based on full-text and PDF views) throughout the final quarter of 2014, and continued to hold the top spot at the start of 2015. http://mq.oxfordjournals.org/reports/most-read