Foundation Award for Research

Dr. James Parsons College of Arts and Letters Music

I.  Focus of Research

James Parsons, Professor of Music (Missouri State University Research Fellow 2004-2007), is a music historian with a special interest in German European music from the mid eighteenth century to the present. During his sixteen years at MSU he has emerged as a leading international scholar with areas of expertise ranging from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; the German art song, or Lied, from 1740 to the present, including Schubert and his older contemporary Johann Friedrich Reichardt; Mozart’s Requiem; the music of Hanns Eisler (especially his Hollywood Songbook), arguably the most colorful, yet poorly-studied composition protégé of twentieth-century musical revolutionary Arnold Schoenberg; and music and film. International and national agencies have supported his scholarship, including the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice), the German Academic Exchange, and a Northwestern University summer institute devoted to Holocaust studies. He regularly is invited to present his scholarly work at conferences in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Hungary, Germany, and throughout the United States.

II.  Major Projects

Parsons is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Lied (Cambridge University Press, 2004), a volume to which he contributed two chapters on German song, the first on the union of music and poetry during the eighteenth century, the second during the twentieth. Essays and review-articles by him have been published in Beethoven Forum, Early Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, Musical Analysis, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Telos. Recent published research and work soon to appear in print includes: “Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder” and “Hugo Wolf” for The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). An entry on the Lied for The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Roland Greene, ed. (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2011). An extended invited essay for which he earned an MSU summer faculty fellowship in 2010: “‘Looking for self and homeland’:  Ernst Krenek’s Reisebuch aus den öster­reichischen Alpen,” Austrian Studies (Summer 2011). An article in which he considers the previously convoluted genesis of the path-breaking film music study by Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, “The exile’s intellectual mission”: Adorno and Eisler’s Composing for the Films,” Telos (Winter 2009) 149, 52-68. And the invited chapter on nineteenth-century German song, “At Home with German Romantic Song,” in Companion to European Romanticism, ed. Michael Ferber (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 538-551.

III. Future Directions of Research

To continue to explore music of all kinds—and perhaps some written by non-German composers (!); this seems an especially worthy endeavor given that music reflects in a fundamental way what it means to be human. Studying music is, at its heart, an examination of the many ways in which our species engages in creative problem solving.

IV.  Topics related to your research and of interest to the broad University Community, for which you are available for presentations and/or consultations.

European art music from approximately 1750 to the present, especially that from the standard “classical” repertory, above all Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and more recent composers such as Eisler.