The Queen's College Record 2020

Reports and College Activities
Identity’, based on earlier work, reached the last of its five venues. Over 260,000 people
visited the exhibition during the run, making it the most successful British Museum touring
exhibition for the last six years. During the year, two doctoral students submitted their
theses. My publications include an article for a volume on Ancient near Eastern traditions
of libraries (OUP) and one for the Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology.
Jim Reed (German – honorary)
My new book, Genesis. The Making of Literary Works
from Homer to Christa Wolf is due to be published
in New York on 15 September. An earlier book, The
Classical Centre. Goethe and Weimar 1775-1832 was
re-issued this year. Last autumn I gave a Kafka lecture
in Prague, ‘Kafka häuslich’, since published in Oxford
German Studies. With no new project in hand, I am
currently writing some informal memoirs.
Owen Rees (Music)
My research this year reflected intersections between
historical musicology and performance, focusing on the
period from the late fifteenth century to the seventeenth,
with particular emphasis on music in England and the
Iberian Peninsula. A long-term project to record – with
my ensemble Contrapunctus – music from the most
important manuscript source of Tudor sacred music,
the Baldwin Partbooks, reached its final stage with the
editing work on an album of motets with psalm texts, by such composers as White
and Mundy. Editorial reconstruction of many of these works was required in order for
them to be performable, and several pieces had not been recorded before. Within
the sphere of Iberian music I completed a book chapter and musical editions for an
international project on Spanish and Portuguese polyphonic styles c.1500, examining
the evidence for modular and formulaic ways of creating polyphony, the traces of
which survive in a group of works preserved in Portuguese sources.
A busy performing schedule between the autumn and the spring included a concert
by Contrapunctus of fifteenth-century Burgundian works as part of the Laus
Polyphoniae Festival (Antwerp), and a concert at Queen’s as part of Contrapunctus’s
Oxford University residency, presenting little-known sacred music from seventeenthcentury
Italy by Giovanni Legrenzi and contemporaries. I also spoke on Radio 3 about
Contrapunctus’s new CD Salve, salve, salve: Josquin’s Spanish Legacy (Signum
Classics), which explores how Spanish composers such as Morales, Guerrero, and
Victoria emulated a favourite compositional device of Josquin Desprez.
24 The Queen’s College | College Record 2020