ALLAN MOORE. MUSICOLOGIST, PIANIST, COMPOSER

This is the personal site of Allan F Moore, musicologist, pianist and composer. It is not a marketing site and exists purely for the presentation of information. If you have any comments or queries on anything here, you can email me at contact (at) allanfmoore (dot) org (dot) uk.

A full list of my publications and recordings of my recent compositions can be found here.

I retired in 2015 from my position as Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey. I am now Professor Emeritus at the University of Surrey.

I gained a first in music from the University of Southampton and a Masters' in Composition from the University of Surrey before returning to Southampton to complete a PhD in 1990 on the late chamber music of Roberto Gerhard and the problem of an adequate analytic method. Until 1999 I led research in the London College of Music and Media at Thames Valley University, and have also taught at Royal Holloway (University of London), City University and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. I have held Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Chester, Kingston and Glasgow.

Subsequent to my doctoral research, I changed tack towards researching popular music, with a particular interest in questions of meaning in recorded song. I was a founder member of the Critical Musicology Forum, was founding co-editor of twentieth-century music, was for a long time coordinating editor for Popular Music, and initiated The Progect, an ongoing network of music scholars researching all manifestations of Progressive Rock. I have served on various other editorial and advisory boards: Popular Musicology Online, the Journal of the Art of Record Production, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale, El oido pensante, Vox popular, The University of Michigan Press series Tracking Pop and the Palgrave series Pop music, Culture, and Identity. I have served as a member of the AHRC peer review college and of the committee of NAMHE (the National Association for Music in Higher Education). I have received research grants from the Arts & Humanities Research Council and from PALATINE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England teaching & learning centre for the performing arts).

Since retiring I have returned to composition, producing mainly piano music. Some of these pieces are available at www.sheetmusicplus.com. Just enter the word "freebardgate" in the search engine ('freebardgate' is my music publisher).

TRANSLATIONS

Style and genre as a mode of aesthetics. This paper was published in the French journal Musurgia, translated by Olivier Julien. It is intended as a postscript to my 'Categorical conventions in music-discourse' since I have no time to write the intended follow-up to that earlier paper.

Borrowing in Celtic music. This paper is a part of my Folk project, which will find its way somewhere into my book- in-progress. It was translated by Luca Marconi and appeared in the proceedings of an interdisciplinary conference held in Urbino.

Analysing rock: means and ends and Issues of style, genre, and idiolect in rock came out of a series of invited papers given at the University of Bologna and translated, if memory serves correctly, by Paola Polselli.

OUT-OF-PRINT PAPERS

U2 and the myth of authenticity in rock. This paper was originally published in Popular Musicology, vol.3, in June 1998 (ISSN 0804-001X and 1357-0951), pages 5-33. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the editors.

These four (rather inexpertly scanned!) papers appeared in the Critical Musicology Newsletter, nos. 1-4 respectively. Edited by Dai Griffiths, this was published by Oxford Brookes University between 1993-1995. More than pleasant, more than delightful addresses folk performance, A problem of history addresses the issue of historical perspective (somehow I've managed to scan the first page twice); Revisiting Lucy Green's theory of musical meaning compares her position with Alan Chambers' work in the sociology of science, while The fall and rise of modernism addresses the absence of the term in musicology until fairly recently (and this one is upside down - you'll need to rotate it).

PROJECTS

Details of research projects I have coordinated can be found here.