Partner Investigator University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (Austria)

Clive Brown was a member of the Faculty of Music at Oxford University from 1980 to 1991. He is now Emeritus Professor of Applied Musicology at the University of Leeds and continues to teach part-time at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst (University of the Arts), Vienna. At the Universities of Oxford and Leeds he supervised a succession of PhD students, many specialising in historical performing practices. At the Vienna University of the Arts and the University of Leiden he currently supervises PhD students in historical performance, and in Vienna teaches an elective in Classical and Romantic performing practice for instrumentalists and singers.

His monographs include Louis Spohr: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, 1984; revised German edition 2009), Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900 (Oxford, 1999), and A Portrait of Mendelssohn (Yale, 2003). He has also published numerous articles on historical performing practice, and other topics. A revised and expanded 2nd edition of Classical and Romantic Performing Practice is currently (2023) in the process of publication.

His critical, performance-oriented editions of music include:

For Breitkopf und Härtel: Beethoven’s 1st, 2nd, and 5th symphonies, Choral Fantasia, and Violin Concerto; Mendelssohn’s opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho (a performing edition).

For AR-Editions: Franz Clement’s D major Violin Concerto.

For the Elgar Complete Edition: Music for Violin (Vol. 37).

For Bärenreiter: Brahms’ Violin Concerto; Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (with a companion volume, Performance Practices in the Violin Concerto op. 64 and Chamber Music for Strings); Brahms’ complete Sonatas for one Instrument and Piano (with a companion volume, Performing Practices in Johannes Brahms’ Chamber Music) jointly authored with Neal Peres Da Costa and Kate Bennett Wadsworth; Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas (including a 20,000-word essay, Reading Between the Lines of Beethoven’s Notation), accompanied by a 144-page online Performing Practice Commentary, co-authored with Neal Peres Da Costa.

At the universities of Oxford and Leeds, he edited and conducted numerous rare operas, including Spohr’s Jessonda (1980), Haydn’s L’anima del filosofo (1983) Schubert’s Fierrabras (1986), Mendelssohn’s Die Hochzeit des Camacho (1987), J. F. Lampe’s The Dragon of Wantley (1996), John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1998), Anton Eberl’s Die Königin der schwarzen Inseln (1999) J. C. Bach’s Amadis de Gaule (2000), Schubert’s Die Freunde von Salamanka (2001), J. F. Lampe’s Margery, or a worse plague than the dragon (2002), Spohr’s Pietro von Abano (2009), and Salieri’s Les Danaides (2011).

As a violinist he has concentrated on practice-led research and performance. During the 1990s and early 2000s he was concertmaster of the Cambridge Classical Orchestra. At the University of Leeds, he led the Ferdinand David Ensemble, giving many chamber performances with his practice-led PhD students. More recently he has performed as a violin and piano duo with Neal Peres Da Costa and Mikayel Balyan, and in a piano trio with Laura Granero and Aldo Mata. He experiments not only with applying historically verifiable performing practices, but also with the physical and technical practices of 19th century violin playing. In his work with professional performers, he seeks to explore the ways in which composers expected executants to read between the lines of their notation, to rediscover the performative freedoms that were regarded by 18th- and 19th-century musicians as essential to beautiful performance – but which were lost during the 20th century – and to apply these creatively in ways that can enrich contemporary music making.