People
Dr SUZANNE ASPDEN, BA, MMus (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ), DPhil (Oxon)
Dr Suzanne Aspden joined the Music Faculty in October 2005 from the University of Southampton. Her research interests centre on eighteenth-century opera, and issues of performance and identity. She has published on these topics in JAMS, JRMA, Musical Quarterly, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music and Letters, and elsewhere. She has co-edited a book on word-music interrelationships, and is currently completing a book on the reputed rivalry of the singers Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni in 1720s London. Her next book project concerns opera and national identity in the eighteenth century. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.
Her lectures for the Music Faculty include undergraduate core courses on seventeenth-century opera, medieval drama, and music-word relations c.1600, and courses on dance music and Handel operas and oratorios. Her postgraduate courses cover issues in opera and musical nationalism.
Selected Publications
Books
Word and Music Studies 4 (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2002), co-edited with Suzanne Lodato and Walter Bernhart
Articles, Essays in Conference Proceedings, and Review Articles
‘The "rival queans" and the play of identity in Handel's Admeto', Cambridge Opera Journal 18 no. 2 (November 2006)
‘Identità in scena sul palco lirico londinese: Faustina Bordoni versus Francesca Cuzzoni', in Händel e il dramma per musica (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, forthcoming)
‘Desiring Handel: Biography and the Strategies of Possession' (review article), Music and Letters 85 (2004), 62-82
‘Managing Passions: the Business of Opera in Eighteenth-Century London' (review article), Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128 (2003), 123-36
‘"Fam'd Handel breathing, tho' transformed to stone": the Composer as Monument', Journal of the American Musicological Society 55(2002), 39-90
‘Arne's Paradox: National Opera in Eighteenth-Century Britain', in Word and Music Studies 4, ed. Suzanne Lodato, Suzanne Aspden, Walter Bernhart (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2002), 195-215
‘Ariadne's Clew: Politics, Allegory, and Opera in London (1734)', The Musical Quarterly 85 (2001), 735-70
‘Ballads and Britons: Imagined Community and the Continuity of "English" Opera', Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122 (1997), 24-51
‘"An infinity of factions": Opera in Eighteenth-Century London and the Undoing of Society', Cambridge Opera Journal 9 (1997), 1-19
Contact Details
Dr S Aspden
Faculty of Music
St Aldates
Oxford
Telephone: 01865 276131
