Professor 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 five 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 directed Early Music Online, a JISC-funded collaboration with The British Library that 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. Publications in this area include an edition of Leipzig church music collected by an English apothecary and amateur musician, James Sherard: Leipzig Church Music from the Sherard Collection: Eight Works by Sebastian Knüpfer, Johann Schelle and Johann Kuhnau (A-R Editions, 2014).
   
• musical authorship, creativity and subjectivity, a topic addressed in his 2019 book, Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach for Cambridge University Press.
  

   

• digital musicology; he led an AHRC-funded project A Big Data History of Music, a collaboration with the British Library which analysed musical-bibliographical records as Big Data.

Since 2016 he has been the joint editor of the Oxford University Press journal Early Music (having served as reviews editor 2004 to 2015); he serves on the Advisory Council of Bach Network UK; he is a sub-panellist in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework; and he is active as an organist and keyboard continuo player.

At Royal Holloway he has held the administrative roles of Director of Research, Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Director of Exams in the Music Department. From 2019 he has been Co-Director of Research in the School of Performing & Digital Arts.

He teaches on the core undergraduate History of Music and Theory & Analysis courses, and leads courses on Digital Tools for Music Studies, 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. 

He has successfully supervised ten PhD students to completion, and currently has a further six PhD students. His PhD students work on such topics as:

• music at the convents of exiled English Catholics c.1700;
• concerts, commerce and charity in Georgian London;
• servants and the sociology of 18th-century English music-making;
• the transmission of French styles of performance in England c.1700;
• the theological and intellectual contexts of Johann Kuhnau's sacred music;
• music and charity schools in 18th-century England;
• 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;
• Christophe Plantin as music printer and distributor;
• iconography of early modern Italian women making music;
• pitch organisation in 17th-century Italian ensemble music;
• the 18th-century composers Johann Georg Roellig and Johann Christian Roellig;
• keyboard arrangements and the rise of the musical canon in England and German-speaking lands, 1750-1800;
• antiquarianism and amateur musicians in 18th-century England;
• sacred music and print culture in Jacobean and Caroline England;
• the Bergreihen in 16th-century German lands.