Christopher Morris

Music and screen media (film, video, television); opera (contemporary staging practices, mediatization of opera) music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (especially Austro-German modernism), aesthetics, cultural theory, music and politics.

One strand of Christopher’s research focuses on the role of music in German culture in the early twentieth century. His book Reading Opera Between the Lines: Orchestral Interludes and Culture Meaning from Wagner to Berg (Cambridge University Press, 2002) draws on critical theory, psychoanalysis and scholarship on gender and sexuality to explore the ‘invisible theatre’ of the many extended orchestral passages in post-Wagnerian opera. Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema, a title in Ashgate’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series, was published in August 2012 (see review here). Investigating the fascination with mountains in Austro-German culture of the early twentieth century, the book shows that music played a critical role in representing and disseminating attitudes to sublime nature, not least because, at its most ideal, music was perceived to be as pure and remote as the Alpine peaks. Christopher is author of numerous articles, chapters, reviews and review essays on topics in musical modernism, the aesthetics of music, opera after Wagner and film music. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Musicological Research, The Musical Quarterly, The Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 19th-Century Music and TDR: The Drama Review. He co-edited a special issue (‘Sound, Voice, Music’) of the peer-reviewed film studies journal Alphaville. Christopher’s current research project centres on the impact of contemporary media technology on the production and consumption of opera. Some of the initial findings of the project have appeared in two articles in The Opera Quarterly and in the chapter ‘“Too Much Music’: Opera as Medium’ in the Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies (2012). Christopher is Associate Editor of The Opera Quarterly.