Dr Joseph Mason
Joseph is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Music in Cambridge and an Official Fellow at Clare Hall.
Prior to joining Clare Hall, Joseph was the Weston Junior Research Fellow in Music at New College, Oxford, and a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. Joseph’s research centres on the music and culture of thirteenth-century France. He is especially interested in questions of musical meaning, and his work combines music analysis with historical work, critical theory, and manuscript studies. He is currently preparing a monograph on the intersections of music and violence during the period. Secondary interests include manuscript studies and the history of the book, digital humanities, and popular music. In addition to his academic work, Joseph is also active as a singer, organist and harpsichordist.
Select publications
- Mason, Joseph W, ‘Extreme vocality and the boundaries of song in the medieval crusades’, Journal of Musicology 41/1 (2024): 73–114.
- Quinlan, Meghan P. and Joseph W. Mason, ‘Popular Culture: In Search of Lost Practices’, in Elizabeth Eva
Leach and Helen Deeming (eds), The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Music in the Middle Ages (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), ch. 6. - Leach, Elizabeth Eva, Joseph W. Mason, and Matthew P. Thomson (eds), A Medieval Songbook: Trouvère MS C (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2022).
- Mason, Joseph W., ‘Trouver et partir: The meaning of structure in trouvère song’, Early Music History 40 (2022), 207–251.
- Mason, Joseph W., ‘Oral and written transmission in the early jeu-parti’, Music & Letters 103/3 (2022):
399–429. - Mason, Joseph W., ‘Newly discovered 14th-century polyphony in Oxford’, Early Music 49/2 (2021), 245–59.
- Mason, Joseph W., ‘Structure and Process in the Old French jeu-parti’, Music Analysis 38/1–2 (2019), 47–79.
- Mason, Joseph W., ‘Debatable Chivalry: A jeu-parti by the Duke of Brittany and its context’, Medium Ævum 87/2 (2018), 255–276.
Select Awards
- Roland Jackson Award (American Musicological Society, 2024), for an article of exceptional merit in the field of music analysis
