Dr Stephen Rose

Stephen Rose joined the Royal Holloway Music Department in 2005, previously holding a Research Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He specialises in music between 1500 and 1750, particularly in German-speaking lands and in England. His research focuses on four areas:

• music-printing, including the circulation, use and symbolic meanings of printed music; he has published seven refereed articles on aspects of musical print culture, and he is Director of Early Music Online, a JISC-funded collaboration with The British Library that has digitised over 320 books of 16th-century printed music.
   
• the social history of music: his book The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach (Cambridge University Press, 2011) uses hitherto overlooked novels to uncover social attitudes towards musicians in Bach's Germany
   
• music in cultural exchange, the topic of a collaborative research network with Uppsala University and the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, funded by the Swedish Foundation for International Co-Operation in Research and Higher Education;
   
• musical authorship, creativity and subjectivity, a topic to be addressed in his 2013 fellowship from Royal Holloway's Humanities and Arts Research Centre.

Forthcoming publications include a critical edition, Leipzig Church Music in the Sherard Collection: Eight Compositions by Johann Kuhnau, Sebastian Knüpfer and Johann Schelle, to be published in the Yale University Collegium Musicum series by A-R Editions.

Since 2004 he has been Reviews Editor of the Oxford University Press journal Early Music; he serves on the Advisory Council of Bach Network UK; he is a member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council; and he is active as an organist and keyboard continuo player.

At Royal Holloway he is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Music Department; previously he also held the role of Director of Exams.

He teaches on the core undergraduate History of Music and Theory & Analysis courses, and leads courses on J. S. Bach: Context and Reception, Music and Society in Purcell’s London, The Art and Craft of 18th-Century Composition, and Baroque Performance Practice. He teaches the MMus courses Techniques of Historical Musicology and Techniques of Performance Studies. 

His PhD students work on such topics as:

• music and politics at the court of Elizabeth I;
• music and confessional identity in 16th-century Heidelberg; 
• music-cultural exchange between Rome and the British Isles in the late 17th century;
• music and aesthetic debates in London around 1700;
• the 18th-century composers Johann Georg Röllig and Johann Christian Röllig;
• the reception of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.