Emeritus Professor of Music (Heather Professor from 1996 – 2007)
b. Munich, 1942. Studied musicology, Latin and Romance literatures, violin (Munich). Ph.D. 1971, TU Berlin (with C. Dahlhaus) on ‘Italian opera arias of the early 18th century’. 1970-82 co-editor, Richard-Wagner-Gesamtausgabe, Munich. 1975-83 Lecturer then Reader in Music, King’s College, U. of London. 1983-90 Professor of Musicology, Yale University. 1990-96 Reader then Professor of Historical Musicology, King’s College London.
Corresponding member, American Musicological Society; Akademie der Wissenschaften, Göttingen. Fellow, British Academy. Prize-winner Balzan Foundation 2012.
(1) Eighteenth-century Italian opera, particularly of Handel and his contemporaries. Recent books: Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. The Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Italian Music and Musicians, ed. R. Strohm, Turnhout: Brepols, 2001. The Operas of Antonio Vivaldi, Florence: Olschki, 2008.
(2) Late-medieval music and its social context. Books: Music in Late Medieval Bruges, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Second, rev. edn: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. The Rise of European Music (1380-1500), Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1993. Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages, ed. R. Strohm and Bonnie J. Blackburn, Oxford University Press, 2001 (The New Oxford History of Music, vol. 3/1, new edn). Guillaume Du Fay, Martin Le Franc und die humanistische Legende der Musik, 191. Neujahrsblatt der Allgemeinen Musikgesellschaft Zürich, 2008. The Lucca Choirbook: Facs. ed. with an introduction and inventory by Reinhard Strohm, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
(3) Modernist/postmodernist debates in musical historiography. Some publications: ‘Collapsing the dialectic: the enlightenment tradition in music and its critics’, in Musicology and its Sister Disciplines: Past, Present and Future (Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the International Musicological Society, London, 1997), ed. D. Greer, Oxford University Press, 2000, 263-272. ‘Looking back at ourselves: the problem with the musical work-concept’, in The Musical Work. Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot, Liverpool University Press, 2000 (Liverpool Music Symposium, 1), 128-52.‘Werk – Performanz – Konsum: Der musikalische Werk-Diskurs’, in Historische Musikwissenschaft: Grundlagen und Perspektiven, ed. Michele Calella and Nikolaus Urbanek, Stuttgart-Weimar: Metzler, 2013, 341-355.
(4) Current projects: Musical Life of the Late Middle Ages in the Austrian Region (c.1340-c.1520), FWF-Project, University of Vienna, 2011-2015. Towards a Global History of Music, International Research Programme 2013-2016, Balzan Prize in Musicology 2012. 18th-century music and social history (iconography, local history, opera singers and impresarios). Early 18th-century opera repertoires at Venice and Vienna.
Critical editions of music (R. Wagner, A. Vivaldi, English 15th-century Masses).
Translations of Italian opera libretti (Handel).
185 individual essays and published conference papers.
