Harrison Reeves-Smith

Area of proposed thesis

My DPhil research develops new analytical approaches to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English music, outlining a comprehensive analytical method and hermeneutic framework for temporal analysis of pre-tonal polyphony. Drawing on a wealth of case studies across late-medieval England (ca.1475-1600), I bring together cultural, religious, material, and musical rhetorics into a co-active dialogue through temporal analysis and historical interpretation, attending to the interplay between musical structures, liturgical rhythms, lived experience, and the theological imagination. In doing so, I seek to uncover the temporal theologies woven into the aesthetic, performative, and liturgical experience of sacred polyphony, exploring how musical expression not only participated in theological conceptions of time, but might itself have constituted a distinctly experiential epistemology of theological time: a means through which time was not merely represented or contemplated, but actively inhabited, negotiated, and known. Addressing the conspicuous absence of sustained phenomenological approaches within early music scholarship, my research broadly asks what might be learned when phenomenology becomes not merely an interpretative perspective, but a legitimate method of historical musical analysis.

Research interests

Medieval and Renaissance Music; Music and Religion; Musical Temporality; Tudor England; Phenomenology; Codicology and Fragmentology; Prosopography; Scholarly Editing; Ecomusicology.

Funding

Oxford-Carolyn and Franco Gianturco Graduate Scholarship

Degrees

BMus Music, University of Edinburgh; MSt Music (Musicology), University of Oxford.