New Departmental Lecturers
As a new academic year begins, we're delighted to share news of three new members of staff; Dr Jonathan Packham, Departmental Lecturer in Music Composition; Dr Oliver Chandler, Departmental Lecturer in Music Analysis, and Dr Luke Lewis, Departmental Lecturer in Music Theory. We asked them to tell us a little more about what they'll be teaching this year...
Dr Jonathan Packham
Having been a member of the Music Faculty since beginning my DPhil here in 2017, I’m delighted to be made Departmental Lecturer in Music Composition. In the 2024-5 academic year I’m excited to be lecturing on the FHS Composition course, presenting on a variety of music under the broad heading ‘Expanded Composition’. I’ll also be teaching electronic music to first-year composition students, and leading seminars on composing using Max/MSP & Jitter for the MSt composers. I’ll also be a seminar leader on the first-year Critical Listening course. When I’m not lecturing or teaching, I’ll mostly be found in the Faculty Studios, or at Lady Margaret Hall, making spatialised noises of various kinds in anticipation of the world premiere of my new composition ghost, performed as part of the New Music Weekend II at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College in January 2025.
Dr Oliver Chandler
I'm really excited to be returning to Oxford's Faculty of Music as a Departmental Lecturer this year. In 2024-5, I'll be teaching 'Musical Analysis and Criticism', part of the Faculty's core curriculum, which focusses on everything from the string quartets of obscure Viennese composers like Mayseder, to geometrical models of harmonic space, to modal piquancy in the music of Beyoncé. I'll also be running my own, wholly new course on the history of music theory, focussing on the roles that institutions (Churches, publishers, universities, governments, think tanks, etc.) have played in the disciplining of humanity's thinking about music. Most importantly, though, I'm planning to practise the guitar in my office a lot, which I'm sure won't annoy the hell out of my colleagues...!
Dr Luke Lewis
It’s super to be made a Departmental Lecturer this year and it’s going to compliment my college tutorial teaching really wonderfully! I’ll be running a new series of lectures on jazz harmony for the first years with the aim of complete beginners eventually being able to write idiomatic piano realisations of jazz lead sheets using demystified concepts such as ‘tritone substitution’, ‘Drop-2’, and ‘Red’s Spread’! I’ll see the first years also for a couple of lectures on arranging music in classical and pop styles. For the finalists, I’ll mainly be teaching 20th-century compositional techniques – everything from Berg and Lutyens to Messiaen and Britten – for the FHS Techniques of Composition modules and FHS composition lectures exploring strategies for writing instrumental and vocal music.
As far as my own work goes, this year I’ll get working on a commission for wind quintet and voice for Ensemble Renard, a new orchestral collaboration that’s just coming together, and an ongoing education project with Music Theatre Wales and Sinfonia Cymru that involves a revival of my London Sinfonietta piece The Echoes Return Slow in 2025.
