Professor Jonathan Cross FBA

Jonathan Cross took up the position of Director and Senior Scholar in Residence at Ertegun House in September 2023. His primary role is to support a body of first-class international graduate students who are studying across the full range of humanities subjects, from philosophy to linguistics, from Roman history to modern Chinese culture.

Jonathan is a musicologist who specialises in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and in musical theory and analysis. His publications include the acclaimed The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge UP, 1998), The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky (Cambridge UP, 2003) and a critical biography of Stravinsky (Reaktion, 2015; also translated into Turkish and Chinese). He has made a particular study of the work of British composer Harrison Birtwistle, including Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music (Faber & Faber, 2000) and on Birtwistle’s landmark opera The Mask of Orpheus (Ashgate, 2009). He speaks regularly at international events, and has held visiting positions in France, Belgium and the USA. In 2015–16 he was Research Associate at Ircam, Paris, where he was working on a project on the so-called spectral music that emerged in the 1970s, and is currently completing a book on the music of living French composer Tristan Murail. He held a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship in 2021-22. He was elected a Member of the Academy of Europe in 2015 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.

Aside from his academic work, Jonathan is committed to engaging with the interests of a wider public on a variety of musical topics, including for such organisations as the Royal Opera House, BBC Proms, South Bank Centre, Singapore Festival of Arts, London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre national d’Île-de-France. He works closely on projects with the London Sinfonietta, and he was Series Consultant to the Philharmonia Orchestra for the 2016 series Stravinsky: Myths and Rituals, which won the Sky Arts Classical Music Award. He writes frequently for Opera and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3.

You can find more about Jonathan’s work on his Faculty page here.