Dr Christopher Wiley

Chris WileyUndergraduate Programme Director 

Christopher Wiley completed his BA (Hons) in Music at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford in 1998 and his MMus in Musicology and Performance at the University of Surrey, Guildford in 2000. His PhD dissertation (Royal Holloway, University of London), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, provides a critical examination of musical biography through studies of texts on a number of different canonical composers.

 

Prior to joining the full-time staff at City University in September 2005, Chris taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Open University, the University of Surrey, and Royal Holloway, principally on topics of Western art-music of the last three centuries and on aspects of music in popular culture.

 

Chris is the author of articles published in Music and Letters, Comparative Criticism, Dictionnaire Berlioz, Biography, Musical Stages, Virginia Woolf Bulletin, and A Malcolm Arnold Companion. He has presented papers on a wide variety of historical, critical, and contemporary topics at many international (and interdisciplinary) conferences, including the Keynote Address at the 2008 Biennial Conference of Musicology hosted by the University of Arts, Belgrade.

 

Chris’s undergraduate teaching currently includes the modules ‘Music Reception’, ‘Popular Music Studies’, and ‘Music and the Moving Image’. He is module leader for ‘Approaches to Music Studies’ and ‘Research Methods’ on the MA programmes, and acts as a dissertation supervisor at all levels from BMus to DMA and PhD. His continuing commitment to high-quality, innovative teaching has been recognised in several awards including the University Prize for Teaching Excellence in 2008.

 

Chris frequently provides information and expert comment to the media on various popular and classical music topics. He is also active as a performer on oboe and keyboard instruments, and holds several music college diplomas.

Research Interests

Musical Biography; Reception History; Historiography and Canonicity; Gender Studies; Historical Musicology, esp. Western art-music of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; Performance Studies, esp. Woodwind Repertories; Popular Music Studies; Music and the Moving Image, esp. Music for Television; Contemporary Musical Theatre; Teaching Practice and Innovation in Higher Education; Ethel Smyth.

Research and Publications

  • ‘“When a Woman Speaks the Truth About Her Body”: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the Challenges of Lesbian Auto/biography’, Music and Letters, Vol. 85, No. 3 (August 2004), pp. 388-414.
  • ‘“A Relic of an Age Still Capable of a Romantic Outlook”: Musical Biography and The Master Musicians Series, 1899-1906’, Comparative Criticism, Vol. 25 (November 2003), pp. 161-202.
  • ‘Theorizing Television Music as Serial Art: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Narratology of Thematic Score’, in Kendra Preston Leonard (ed.), Music in Joss Whedon’s Worlds (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009), pp. 38-79.
  • ‘Malcolm Arnold’s Contribution to the Woodwind Repertory’, in Raphael D. Thöne (ed.), A Companion to Malcolm Arnold ([Moers]: Edition Wissenschaft, 2009), pp. 31-57.