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Jacob Derkert-RosenbergSenior lecturer

About me

Lecturer in Musicology. Born 1957; Ph. D. 1998; Research Fellow Stockholm University 2003-2007. Head, Dept of Musicology Fall 2004, and Dept of Musicology and Performance Studies 2006-2012. Chairman, Swedish Society for Musicology 2009-2014. Editor of STM-online 2011-2013 and main editor of STM-SJM (Swedish Journal of Music Research) 2014-2016.

Teaching

I have been responsible for the development of several courses, e.g. Art Music of the 20th Century; Experimental Music and Sound Art; Music and Modern Media Technologies; Music, Markets, and Immaterial Rights; Aesthetics and Philosophy of Music; Formalisms of the Arts.

Since 2007, six Ph D theses for which I have been a supervisor (main- or co-) have been successfully defended.

Research

I have done research in two distinct areas:

The history of French Art Music around 1900, with main focus on Debussy.

Formalist ideologies of Modern Art Music, with a certain focus on American Music.

The former first embodied itself in my PhD Thesis (1998), combining 1) a historical and critical survey of the views of harmony and tonality in two fields of reception of Claude Debussy's works (French criticism 1887-1910, German-language academic literature 1920-1971), 2) a study in which a 'de-ideologized' general theory of tonality is applied to Debussy, and 3) the exposition and demonstration of an alternative way to study articulation in terms of harmonic fields.

A second period of study of Debussy was initiated during a sabbatical leave, autumn 2012, which I spent in Paris, extensively developing the study of reception that had been done as part of my PhD research in the mid 90's. The research in question involves several problems: From matters of interpretation of artistic strategies defying both social-collective determinations and individual explicitness to pseudo-technical problems in regard to the understanding of certain aspects of form in a few of Debussy's works, also involving a plea for a historically (e.g. in reception) based music analysis.

The study of formalisms was begun during my tenure as research fellow. It has materialized itself in a work on mathematics and music theory (2007), treating mathematics not as a compositional or scientific tool but as an element of ideological understandings. Since, it has developed into a comprehensive research on different varieties of musical formalisms.

All research has been made under the auspices of a developing metatheory of music and ideology, so far just presented in essayistic form in Swedish (2011).

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

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