Reuben Phillips is a musicologist with research interests in Austro-German music and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His British Academy postdoctoral project examines the library that belonged to the composer Johannes Brahms – a notable collection of books, manuscripts, and printed music that is preserved today in the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.
Reuben is the author of articles in the journals 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and the Musical Quarterly, and served as co-editor (with Nicole Grimes) of the recent Oxford University Press volume Rethinking Brahms. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the American Brahms Society, the DAAD, the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin, the British Library, and Edinburgh University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.
In the Faculty of Music and at St Hugh’s College Reuben’s teaching has included MSt seminars, undergraduate lectures, and tutorials in music history, aesthetics, and analysis. During the academic year 2022–2023 he was affiliated to the Institute for Musicology of the University of Vienna, supported by a supplementary research grant from the Österreichischer Austauschdienst. He has delivered conference papers and guest lectures internationally in English and German. Recent writings for non-specialist audiences include programme notes for the Castalian Quartet concerts in Oxford and the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado.
Book
Rethinking Brahms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Co-edited with Nicole Grimes.
Articles
‘The Resonance of the Romantic Horn Call in the Reception of Brahms’s Trio, Op. 40’, 19th-Century Music 147 (2023): 129–54.
‘Handling Tovey’s Bach’, Music & Letters 103 (2022): 464–92. (Open Access)
‘Between Hoffmann and Goethe: The Young Brahms as Reader’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 146 (2021): 455–89.
‘Exhumations, Honorary Graves, and the Fashioning of Vienna’s Self-Image as the “City of Music”’, Musical Quarterly 102 (2019): 303–49.
Chapters
‘Brahms in the Schumann Library’ in Rethinking Brahms, Nicole Grimes and Reuben Phillips, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 7–24.
‘Introduction’ with Nicole Grimes in Rethinking Brahms, Nicole Grimes and Reuben Phillips, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 1–3.
Reviews
‘Brahms’ Schubert-Rezeption im Wiener Kontext edited by Otto Biba, Gernot Gruber, Katharina Loose-Einfalt and Siegfried Oechsle’, Music & Letters 100 (2019): 562–5.
‘Johannes Brahms: Die Lieder. Ein musikalischer Werkführer by Matthias Schmidt’, Music & Letters 98 (2017): 143–4.
‘Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance edited by Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges’, Notes 73 (2016): 94–8.
‘Brahms Among Friends: Listening, Performance, and the Rhetoric of Allusion by Paul Berry’, Notes 72 (2016): 556–8.
‘Performing Brahms in the 21st century’, Early Music 43 (2015): 721–2.
Website entry
‘Tovey’s Analyses’, The European Network for Theory & Analysis of Music, https://europeanmusictheory.wordpress.com/tovey-analyses/ (published September 2021).
