Dr Adam Behan
Biography
I am a musicologist who specialises in performance studies. I work for the most part on musical recordings and the performance of western music in the twentieth century, classical and popular.
I hold degrees from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, where my graduate studies were funded by a Peterhouse Graduate Studentship. I took up a one-year lecturing post in Maynooth University in 2022, and begin a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship here in October 2023 with a new project on the cultural history of Irish popular music in the twentieth century.
My research has won awards including the Karl Geiringer Scholarship from the American Brahms Society and the Westrup Prize from the Music & Letters Trust. I have published articles in Music Analysis, Twentieth-Century Music, Quodlibet and Music & Letters, and I have presented papers at multiple international conferences. My latest article, entitled ‘Joni Mitchell’s Urges for Going, 1965–67: Coffeehouses, Counterculture and Care’, appears in the 2023 spring issue of The Journal of the Society for American Music.
All of my publications are open access and can be downloaded from my Academia page.
Research Interests
- western music and culture in the twentieth century
- the entangled histories of musical performance and recording technology
- the analysis of musical performances (through, but not limited to, Sonic Visualiser)
- conceptual approaches to studying individual musical performers
- ethics of care and musicology
Peer Reviewed Journal
| Year | Publication | |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Adam Behan (2023) 'Joni Mitchell's Urges for Going, 1965–67: Coffeehouses, Counterculture, and Care'. Journal of the Society for American Music, 17 (1):68-85. | |
| 2022 | Adam Behan (2022) 'Reading Creativity Forwards and Backwards: Process and Product Revisited with Herbert von Karajan's Legato Aesthetic and Hypermasculinity'. Music and Letters, 103 (4):708-728. | |
| 2021 | Adam Behan (2021) 'Glenn Gould in Six Scenes: Performance as Self-Care'. Quodlibet, 76 :54-84. | |
| 2021 | Adam Behan (2021) 'Large-Scale Structure, Performance and Brahms's Op. 119 No. 2'. Music Analysis, 40 (1):104-130. [Link] | |
| 2021 | Adam Behan (2021) 'The Historiography of the Twentieth-Century Classical Performer: Life, Work, Artistry'. Twentieth-Century Music, 18 (2):161-184. [Link] |