The North American British Music Studies Association

The North American British Music Studies Association

NABMSA Founding Members

The 2024 biennial conference of the North American British Music Studies Association marked the 20-year anniversary of the organization. In appreciation, the membership voted to establish and codify in the by-laws a new membership category of Founding Member. This distinction recognizes the forethought and ongoing efforts of the five founders of the professional society, granting lifetime membership in the process.

 

 

Christina Fuhrmann Christina Fuhrmann is Professor of Music History and Literature at Baldwin Wallace University, where she edits BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach institute and is on the leadership team of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute. She previously taught at Ashland University, where she was the 2015 winner of the Taylor Excellence in Teaching Award. She has published numerous books, articles, and editions relating to opera in 19 th -century Britain, including an edition of Henry Bishop’s 1819 adaptation of “Le Nozze di Figaro” with A-R Editions, the edited collection Opera and British Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Alison Mero for Clemson University Press, and the book Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses, from Mozart to Bellini (Cambridge University Press), which received NABMSA’s Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music. She was a founding member of NABMSA and has served the society as Treasurer, Chair of the Development Committee, Program Committee member, and Chair of the Prize Committee.

 

 Deborah Heckert

An active scholar of 19th and 20th-century British music studies, Deborah Heckert is the author of Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1925, and has essays in the volumes Elgar and His World, British Music and Modernism, 1995-1960, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism and the forthcoming Vaughan Williams in Context. Her current research interests focus on British modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, the role of history in the identity politics of 19th and 20th century British music, and the intersections between British music and the visual arts. She teaches in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University, where she is also undergraduate program director. She also teaches at New York University and Brooklyn College, CUNY.

 

Brooks Kuykendall Brooks Kuykendall

Brooks Kuykendall is Professor of Music at the University of Mary Washington. Much of his published research has focused on British music c. 1860-1960.  He edited two volumes of OUP’s William Walton Edition, as well as a volume of Stanford’s orchestral song cycles for A-R.  Although he has worked on a variety of topics, and despite a lot of interests that he has not found time for, he keeps coming back to Gilbert & Sullivan.  He has served NABMSA in many capacities, including several terms on the conference program committee and on the McVeagh Prize committee.  Beyond British music, his work has concentrated on musical philology and the nature of musical text.  His blog Settling Scores aims to present such issues in the least daunting terms possible.

 

Charles McGuire Charles McGuire

Charles Edward McGuire, Professor of Musicology at Oberlin College & Conservatory, studies the music of Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams as well as musical festivals, sight-singing techniques, and the intersection of choral singing and moral reform movements. His publications include Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative (Ashgate Press, 2002) and The Historical Dictionary of English Music (Scarecrow Press, 2011), which he co-authored with Oberlin colleague Steven Plank. McGuire is also the editor of the book European Musical Competitions, 1700-1940: History, Context, and Meanings (Brepols, 2025). McGuire is a past Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom and Humanities Writ Large Visiting Fellow at Duke University. He is the principal investigator of the Musical Festivals Database, a comprehensive relational database of information about British festivals held between 1695 and 1940.

 

Jennifer Oates Jennifer Oates

Jennifer Oates is the Library Director at Carroll College. Her work on music in Britain includes composer-centered studies of Hamish MacCunn (including her 2013 biography in Routledge’s Nineteenth-Century British Music series) and Sir Granville Bantock, depictions of Scotland in nineteenth-century art music to Brigadoon, and modernism in music in the British Isles. She has edited critical editions of MacCunn’s overtures and songs for the Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries series and performance editions of selected MacCunn part songs with Yelton Rhodes Music. Her article, “Engaging with Research and Resources in Music History Courses,” in the spring 2014 issue of The Journal of Music History Pedagogy, received the Music Library Association’s 2016 Richard S. Hill Award for best library instruction/pedagogy article. She is also one of the founders and the current President of the North American British Music Association.