Julie Brown, FBA

Julie Brown's research broadly concerns the cultural and media histories of twentieth-century music. Her work on Schoenberg and Bartók tackles questions of race, gender and ideological Wagnerism; her work on film and television music likewise considers gender, but also screen manifestations of music-as-idea and silent film music. Among her publications are Schoenberg and Redemption (Cambridge, 2014), 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 contributing editor, with Annette Davison, of The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), and with Nicholas Cook and Stephen Cottrell for Defining the Discographic Self: ‘Desert Island Discs’ in Context (Oxford University Press, 2017), which followed a jointly-convened conference about the famous BBC Radio 4 programme at the British Academy. She also serves on the editorial board of the scholarly journal Twentieth-Century Music, and on the advisory boards of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image and Music Analysis. In 2025 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. 

Julie's current research focusses on the cultural and technological contexts of silent and transition film performance. 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 (conductor, Philip Ellis) 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 was also Principal Investigator for a British Academy Research Development Award entitled '"Film fitting" in Britain, 1913-1926'. In November 2013 Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra (conductor, Andrew Gourlay) performed her recreation of the music used for original screenings of the silent film The Epic of Everest (J.B. Noel, 1924). The score was then recorded and included on a DVD release of the BFI's recent restoration of the film print, along with original live prelude music and other musical extras curated by Julie.  

Julie is now completing two monographs. One is on the musical presentation of early travelogue films, focussing especially on the 1922 and 1924 films of the RGS's expeditions to Mount Everest. The other concerns cinema performance in 1920s Britain, focussing on the role played by the extended Goossens family. 

At Royal Holloway she taught a variety of courses and held a number of senior leadership roles, including Head of Department, School Director of Postgraduate Taught Education, and Founding Director of the Centre for Audiovisual Research (CAVR) for which she convened a collaborative workshop on the music of Climbing Mount Everest (1922).