Professor Julian Horton publishes new article on the nineteenth-century violin concerto in Music Theory Spectrum

Authored jointly by Professor Horton and Professor Peter H. Smith of the University of Notre Dame, the new article explores aspects of first-movement practice in 138 violin concertos written between 1782 (Viotti) and 1910 (Elgar), along the way encompassing music by Beethoven, Paganini, Kreutzer, De Bériot, Spohr, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Maier-Röntgen, Brahms, Dvořák, Glazunov and many others. It is the first published fruits of a two-year collaborative research project, funded by the Durham-Notre Dame seedcorn grant scheme and undertaken by Horton, Smith and Durham Music Department doctoral student Dominik Mitterer, which looks beyond well-known canonical repertoire to unearth the full diversity of practices adopted by composers in the long nineteenth century in this important but under-examined genre. The project’s next output – a book on the subject, jointly edited by Horton and Smith – is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.