David Code

Biography

I took a BMus in Piano Performance at the University of Toronto before proceeding to post-graduate study in Historical Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. My PhD dissertation began as an attempt to refine a performance-based interpretive approach to Debussy's piano music, and developed into an interdisciplinary analysis of poetics, performance and materiality in Mallarmé, Debussy and Matisse. I held a Mellon teaching and research fellowship at Stanford University for two years and taught for a year at Bishop's University in Quebec before arriving at Glasgow in July 2002.

Research Interest

So far, my work has generally remained closely analytical at basis, but in a way that resists all theoretical orthodoxy: my pursuit of the cultural meanings embodied in (and/or attributed to) modernist art in all media (music, poetry, painting, film) leads me to rigorous formal interpretations of such oft-neglected dimensions as orchestral timbre and pianistic gesture in Debussy; form and mode in Mallarmé. A similar pursuit of the interaction between aesthetic forms and ideological implications lies behind my 2007 account of ‘architectonic’ rhythmic conception in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. A more recent project, a biography of Debussy for the Reaktion Press ‘Critical Lives’ series on key modern figures (published July 2010), offered me the chance to reframe several such interactions in more broadly accessible terms—to which end I traced the composer’s ‘life and works’ giving particular focus to his evolving literary interests. I have recently been awarded an AHRC Research Fellowship to consolidate and elaborate my multivalent approach to Debussy analysis and interpretation in a more specialist, metacritical monograph, provisionally titled Debussy’s Allegories of Modern Listening. At the same time I continue to pursue a more recently opened avenue of research into the use of pre-existent music in Stanley Kubrick’s films: a first article (on The Shining) was published in early 2010; a second (on 2001) is in preparation.