Christopher Ballantine is Professor of Music Emeritus and Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Celebrated for his pioneering work as a radical musicologist, his philosophically grounded writings are widely published internationally; they explore the meanings and social implications of music, and the forces that shape it. In particular, he has written about the music of the last 100 years, the philosophy and sociology of music, and South African music. A graduate of the universities of Cambridge, Cape Town, and Witwatersrand, he is the author of several books, including Music and its Social Meanings; the award-winning Marabi Nights: Jazz, ‘Race’ and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa; and the co-authored Living Together; Living Apart? Towards Social Cohesion in a Future South Africa. Recent publications include chapters in The Routledge Handbook to Jazz Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination (both in 2019).
James Donaldson is a doctoral candidate in Music Theory at McGill University. His primary research areas are Surrealism, Spectralism, and Semiotics, on which he has presented at conferences across Europe and North America. His dissertation draws upon concepts from literary semiotics to build a theory of form for later twentieth-century music, focusing on the works of Ligeti and Thomas Adès.
William Fourie is an Associate Fellow of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University and a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London's Department of Music. His research is concerned with musical modernism in South Africa.
Michael Gallope is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota where he is also affiliate faculty in the School of Music, Department of American Studies, and the graduate programme in Moving Image Studies. He is the author of Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (University of Chicago Press, 2017), as well as over a dozen articles and essays. As a musician, he works in a variety of genres from avant-garde composition to rock music and West African electronica.
Thomas Hyde is a composer whose output includes an opera, That Man Stephen Ward, recently revived at the Cheltenham Festival and commercially recorded on Resonus Classics, a Symphony, premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2018, and a setting of the Magnificat for The Sixteen. He is currently working on his second opera with the novelist Alexander McCall Smith. He was editor of David Matthews: Essays, Tributes and Criticism (Plumbago Books, 2014) and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford.
Emily MacGregor is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at King's College, London. Previously, she held a Marie Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University (2016–18) and Royal Holloway, University of London (2019), after completing her DPhil in Music at Oxford University in 2016. Her published articles focus on the music and cultural history of Germany and North America in the first half of the twentieth century, and in 2019 her article in The Musical Quarterly was awarded the Royal Musical Association's Jerome Roche Prize for a distinguished article by a scholar at an early stage of their career. She is currently completing a monograph titled The Symphony in 1933, while also embarking on a new research project exploring music, technology, and the experience of exile and diaspora in New York from 1930 to 1945.
Caitlin Schmid is a Visiting Professor of Music at Carleton College in 2020 and a musicologist specializing in the politics of 1960s experimental music and performance art. She received her PhD in Historical Musicology from Harvard University in 2019. She has given presentations on her research at regional and national conferences and her paper at the 2018 American Musicological Society Conference received the Paul A. Pisk Prize. Her public facing work includes blog posts for NewMusicBox and Musicology Now, as well as invited lectures at the Harvard Art Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
