Research interests

Staff music research interests aim both to support current undergraduate elective module teaching and to support the wider research environment of the University. 

Please contact the Music Centre (music@st-andrews.ac.uk) if you would like to explore a new research collaboration with a member of staff whose current music research interests (listed below) best matches your area of enquiry. 

Chris Bragg
Research interests include:

• organ history, design and restoration of historic instruments
• 20th-century organ reform movement
• particular interest in historic organs in Scotland and Germany.

Michael Downes
Research interests include:

• opera (music, text, translation, performance)
• relationships between music and religion
• art song
• Wagner and Wagnerism
• late 19th and early 20th-century music, especially in Paris (Debussy, Stravinsky) and Britain (Elgar, Britten).

Michael Ferguson
Research interests include:

• sacred music, particularly Catholic church liturgy in modern Scotland.

Jonathan Kemp
Research interests include:

• acoustics
• guitar strings
• brass instruments
• consonance
• bioacoustics.

Jane Pettegree
Research interests include:

• early modern drama and opera
• song lyric and poetics
• performance and identity
• ethnomusicology, especially of Scottish music.

Tom Wilkinson
Research interests include:

• early keyboard instruments and performance
• J S Bach music compositions and reception.

Bede Williams
Research interests include:

• artistic research
• composer-performer collaboration
• conducting.