Benjamin Earle

I have been teaching at the University of Birmingham since 2004. Before that I held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford.

My research interests are in the history, analysis and criticism of twentieth-century concert music and opera, mostly Italian and British, though I have also written about the music of the Second Viennese School. In my work, I generally try to bring the close reading of musical texts into contact with the history of philosophical aesthetics, especially as represented by Marxist thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno and Fredric Jameson. I am also interested in the cultural politics of music, especially in the context of fascism in Italy and its aftermath. Several of my publications have been concerned with the concept of musical modernism; future plans include the elaboration of a theory of musical realism.