Christopher Wiley
Main website: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/christopher-wiley
Full texts of all publications: http://surrey.academia.edu/ChristopherWiley
E-mail: c.wiley@surrey.ac.uk
Dr Christopher Wiley completed his BA(Hons) in Music at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford in 1998 and his MMus at the University of Surrey in 2000. His PhD dissertation, Re-writing Composers’ Lives: Critical Historiography and Musical Biography, undertaken at the University of London and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, provides a critical examination of musical biography through comparative studies of texts on several canonical composers. In addition to musical biography and life-writing, his other research interests include Ethel Smyth, autoethnography, music in popular culture, and higher education learning and teaching.
Chris joined the University of Surrey in September 2013 as Senior Lecturer and Director of Learning & Teaching in the School of Arts. Prior to this position, he was Director of Undergraduate Studies (2009–13) and Director of the MA Programmes (2005–09) in the Department of Music at City University London. He is currently Programme Director for the BMus(Hons) Music programme (2019–), having been Director of Postgraduate Research and Senior Professional Training Year Tutor (2018–19). He has previously taught at institutions including the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Open University, and Royal Holloway.
Chris is the author of articles published in journals including The Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters, Journal of Musicological Research, Women's History Review, Comparative Criticism, Studies in Educational Evaluation, and Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, in addition to many book chapters. He has delivered papers on historical, critical, and educational topics at many international and interdisciplinary conferences in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, and elsewhere, including the Keynote Address at a four-day Biennial Conference of Musicology hosted by the University of Arts, Belgrade, as well as presenting invited colloquia at the Faculties of Music of the Universities of both Oxford and Cambridge.
Chris is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Music, Autoethnography and Reflexivity (Routledge, 2024); Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen: The Making of a Movement (Routledge, 2021); Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives (Palgrave, 2020); and Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists: Challenges, Practices, and Complexities (Palgrave, 2020); as well as a guest-edited special-issue of the Journal of Musicological Research, Vol. 38, Nos. 3–4, entitled ‘Musical Biography: Myth, Ideology, and Narrative’ (2019). He is currently editing projects for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Boydell & Brewer, the journal Performance Research, and the music publisher Breitkopf & Härtel.
Chris’s teaching has crystallized around Western art-music of the last three centuries, popular music studies, film and television music, critical musicology, music theory, and musical theatre, and he has acted as a supervisor at all levels from undergraduate dissertations to doctoral research. His continuing commitment to teaching of the highest quality has been widely recognized; he became an International Distinguished Educator with Turning Technologies in 2012 (the first ever appointment worldwide in the Arts and Humanities) and was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2013.
Chris frequently provides expert comment to the international media in the areas of popular music, musical theatre, classical music, and education. He is much sought after as a public speaker, including pre-performance talks for Glyndebourne Opera and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He is a Director and Trustee of Retrospect Opera, which has commercially released 12 recordings to date, and is Musical Executor and a Trustee of The Richard Stoker Trust.
In 2014, Chris completed the degree of MA in Academic Practice with Distinction at City, University of London. He became a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2017, having been made a Senior Fellow two years earlier. In 2020, he took up a semester-long Faculty Research Fellowship at the University of Surrey.
Phone: +44 (0) 1438 686513
Address: Department of Music and Media
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH
United Kingdom
Full texts of all publications: http://surrey.academia.edu/ChristopherWiley
E-mail: c.wiley@surrey.ac.uk
Dr Christopher Wiley completed his BA(Hons) in Music at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford in 1998 and his MMus at the University of Surrey in 2000. His PhD dissertation, Re-writing Composers’ Lives: Critical Historiography and Musical Biography, undertaken at the University of London and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, provides a critical examination of musical biography through comparative studies of texts on several canonical composers. In addition to musical biography and life-writing, his other research interests include Ethel Smyth, autoethnography, music in popular culture, and higher education learning and teaching.
Chris joined the University of Surrey in September 2013 as Senior Lecturer and Director of Learning & Teaching in the School of Arts. Prior to this position, he was Director of Undergraduate Studies (2009–13) and Director of the MA Programmes (2005–09) in the Department of Music at City University London. He is currently Programme Director for the BMus(Hons) Music programme (2019–), having been Director of Postgraduate Research and Senior Professional Training Year Tutor (2018–19). He has previously taught at institutions including the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Open University, and Royal Holloway.
Chris is the author of articles published in journals including The Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters, Journal of Musicological Research, Women's History Review, Comparative Criticism, Studies in Educational Evaluation, and Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, in addition to many book chapters. He has delivered papers on historical, critical, and educational topics at many international and interdisciplinary conferences in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, and elsewhere, including the Keynote Address at a four-day Biennial Conference of Musicology hosted by the University of Arts, Belgrade, as well as presenting invited colloquia at the Faculties of Music of the Universities of both Oxford and Cambridge.
Chris is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Music, Autoethnography and Reflexivity (Routledge, 2024); Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen: The Making of a Movement (Routledge, 2021); Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives (Palgrave, 2020); and Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists: Challenges, Practices, and Complexities (Palgrave, 2020); as well as a guest-edited special-issue of the Journal of Musicological Research, Vol. 38, Nos. 3–4, entitled ‘Musical Biography: Myth, Ideology, and Narrative’ (2019). He is currently editing projects for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Boydell & Brewer, the journal Performance Research, and the music publisher Breitkopf & Härtel.
Chris’s teaching has crystallized around Western art-music of the last three centuries, popular music studies, film and television music, critical musicology, music theory, and musical theatre, and he has acted as a supervisor at all levels from undergraduate dissertations to doctoral research. His continuing commitment to teaching of the highest quality has been widely recognized; he became an International Distinguished Educator with Turning Technologies in 2012 (the first ever appointment worldwide in the Arts and Humanities) and was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2013.
Chris frequently provides expert comment to the international media in the areas of popular music, musical theatre, classical music, and education. He is much sought after as a public speaker, including pre-performance talks for Glyndebourne Opera and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He is a Director and Trustee of Retrospect Opera, which has commercially released 12 recordings to date, and is Musical Executor and a Trustee of The Richard Stoker Trust.
In 2014, Chris completed the degree of MA in Academic Practice with Distinction at City, University of London. He became a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2017, having been made a Senior Fellow two years earlier. In 2020, he took up a semester-long Faculty Research Fellowship at the University of Surrey.
Phone: +44 (0) 1438 686513
Address: Department of Music and Media
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH
United Kingdom
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In determining the relevance of their subjects to the interpretative communities for whom they were writing, the Master Musicians authors appealed heavily to the prevalent values of the day, for their volumes quickly became discernible as period pieces. They typically offer a teleological charting of their protagonists’ creative genius, from mere talent exhibited in their (often prodigious) childhood to death at the height of their compositional powers, which are brought to fruition – in accordance with the Protestant work ethic – only through industrious and unremitting labours throughout their self-disciplined career. The representation of specific women as muse to their attendant composer, capable only of inspiring or realising (but not exhibiting) musical genius, and their corresponding rhetorical function as signifiers of subjects’ productivity and developing creativity, enforced the androcentricity of musical canon as well as the patriarchal hegemony of contemporary society.
The Master Musicians biographers also foregrounded any connections that could be drawn with England, thus to an extent appropriating the Great Composers and their music for that nation, counterbalancing its relative dearth of native genius. This endeavour served to demonstrate the country’s cultural awareness, and its capability (over and above Continental counterparts) to recognise and support greatness in music, against the backdrop of the emergent English Musical Renaissance and a general environment of nationalism. The resulting biographical paradigms had profound implications not only for the membership of the proposed canon but also for discussions of the music itself, employing such factors as continual creative development, female inspiration and connections to England as markers of greatness within discursive contexts where life and works were consciously separated and technical descriptions kept to a minimum for the benefit of the non-specialist readership.
This research draws on a series of interviews and other consultations with students conducted at City University London, UK in the 2011–12 academic year with the purpose of reviewing their understanding of the fundamental vocabulary of assessment practice, whether that vocabulary appears within the learning outcomes and assessment criteria, the feedback itself, or the wider context of assessment policy. Ultimately, it explores whether staff and students in Higher Education are presently being divided by a common language, and, in light of the students’ narratives, proposes a series of recommendations by which assessment and feedback practices may be improved. Such recommendations include the provision of papers submitted by previous students for the benefit of current cohorts, a more active engagement of students with the regulatory documentation, a greater use made of dialogic feedback methods, and the need for change to the existing educational culture to facilitate these enhancements.
In determining the relevance of their subjects to the interpretative communities for whom they were writing, the Master Musicians authors appealed heavily to the prevalent values of the day, for their volumes quickly became discernible as period pieces. They typically offer a teleological charting of their protagonists’ creative genius, from mere talent exhibited in their (often prodigious) childhood to death at the height of their compositional powers, which are brought to fruition – in accordance with the Protestant work ethic – only through industrious and unremitting labours throughout their self-disciplined career. The representation of specific women as muse to their attendant composer, capable only of inspiring or realising (but not exhibiting) musical genius, and their corresponding rhetorical function as signifiers of subjects’ productivity and developing creativity, enforced the androcentricity of musical canon as well as the patriarchal hegemony of contemporary society.
The Master Musicians biographers also foregrounded any connections that could be drawn with England, thus to an extent appropriating the Great Composers and their music for that nation, counterbalancing its relative dearth of native genius. This endeavour served to demonstrate the country’s cultural awareness, and its capability (over and above Continental counterparts) to recognise and support greatness in music, against the backdrop of the emergent English Musical Renaissance and a general environment of nationalism. The resulting biographical paradigms had profound implications not only for the membership of the proposed canon but also for discussions of the music itself, employing such factors as continual creative development, female inspiration and connections to England as markers of greatness within discursive contexts where life and works were consciously separated and technical descriptions kept to a minimum for the benefit of the non-specialist readership.
This research draws on a series of interviews and other consultations with students conducted at City University London, UK in the 2011–12 academic year with the purpose of reviewing their understanding of the fundamental vocabulary of assessment practice, whether that vocabulary appears within the learning outcomes and assessment criteria, the feedback itself, or the wider context of assessment policy. Ultimately, it explores whether staff and students in Higher Education are presently being divided by a common language, and, in light of the students’ narratives, proposes a series of recommendations by which assessment and feedback practices may be improved. Such recommendations include the provision of papers submitted by previous students for the benefit of current cohorts, a more active engagement of students with the regulatory documentation, a greater use made of dialogic feedback methods, and the need for change to the existing educational culture to facilitate these enhancements.