Cliff Eisen

The bulk of my research centres on Mozart and music of the late eighteenth-century including history and biography, analysis, source studies, performance practice, Mozart's cultural context and Mozart historiography. The theoretical heart of much of this research is biography broadly understood, the idea that no matter how divorced we may think we are from biography, it is the narratives we construct of composers' lives that motivate, both historically and in the present, the ways in which we read Mozart's music and the analytical methods we have constructed to understand his works. The practical consequences of this theoretical stance is to increase the number of different and new ways in which we can understand the composer. Beyond Mozart, though, my research also includes Broadway musicals of the period 1930-1960 - again with an emphasis on holisitic readings based on sources, documents, history, cultural context and analysis - as well as 20th-century American song (Porter, Gershwin, Styne, Arlen and others) and popular music of the 1960s.

Mozart; Classical Period; Performance Practice; Broadway; 20th-century American Song and Popular Music.