Dr Julie Brown

Julie Brown's research interests are several: early twentieth-century music (particularly Schoenberg and Bartók), music analysis/criticism, and music and the moving image. She has published on Schoenberg, Webern and Bartók as well as uses of music in film and television. Among her publications are Bartók and the Grotesque (Ashgate, 2007) and the edited collection Western Music and Race (Cambridge, 2007), which was awarded the Ruth A. Solie Award by the American Musicological Society. She is also contributing editor, with Annette Davison, of The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her new monograph Schoenberg and the Longing for Redemption is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She also serves on the advisory boards of the scholarly journals Music, Sound, and the Moving Image and Music Analysis.

Her current research focusses on film music, particularly music of the silent film and transition periods. As Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded Research Network 'The Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain' she co-organised four separate events between 2009 and 2011; the final conference, held in April 2011 in conjunction with London's Barbican Cinema and the British Silent Film Festival, included a live performance of her re-synchronisation of Frederick Laurence's original 1925 British score for the 40-minute soviet film Morozko [Father Frost] (Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky, 1924). She is also Principal Investigator for a British Academy Research Development Award entitled '"Film fitting" in Britain, 1913-1926'. 

Her research on early film sound touches on a range of topics. Live film prologues, the forms taken by early film 'scores', the transition to synchronised sound film, and the cinema organ and its cultures are all interests. She is currently preparing a monograph on listening in the cinema in 1920s London.

With Nicholas Cook (Cambridge) and Stephen Cottrell (City University) she is currently in the process of organising a conference examining the long-running BBC Radio 4 series 'Desert Island Discs'. Entitled '"Desert Island Discs" and the Discographic Self' the conference will take place at the British Academy in November 2013 and bring together musicologists, sociologists, and media scholars to reflect on the programme’s historical and contextual significance, its changing position in Britain’s continually evolving media, and its imitators in other parts of the world. Of particular interest are the evidence of meanings imputed to music by both castaways and interviewers, the ways in which music is invoked in the public presentation of self, the incorporation of music within personal narratives, and changes during the programme's 70 years in musical tastes among the different demographic groups from which castaways are drawn. 

She teaches a range of courses at Royal Holloway and welcomes applications from potential PhD students on film music topics.