Kelvin Lee joins the School of Music as Visiting Research Fellow
The School of Music is delighted to welcome Dr Kelvin Lee as our Visiting Research Fellow.
Kelvin’s research focuses on the intersections between musical systems and the broader philosophical thought and cultural dialogues at the turn of the twentieth century, specifically the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music in Europe and East Asia. He studied music at the University of Hong Kong, where he received a BA (Hons) and an MPhil in Musicology, before completing an MA in Conducting at the University of York, and a PhD in Musicology at Durham University. Prior to joining Leeds, he held fellowships from Research Foundation Flanders and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Kelvin has published in journals and edited volumes such as Music Analysis, Journal of Music Theory, Musurgia and Revue belge de Musicologie, among others. His article on Arnold Schoenberg and the symphonic poem was awarded the Musurgia 25th Anniversary Prize by the French Society for Music Analysis.
Kelvin’s ongoing work involves two book projects. The first, a monograph titled The Sonata Moment: Dialectical Form and Symphonic Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, develops a dialectical theory of symphonic sonata form and examines the emergence of Austro-German musical modernism via the aesthetics of the ‘moment’. The second, an essay collection titled Formenlehre and the Challenge of History: Rethinking Contexts in Fin-de-Siècle Musical Form, considers the implications of post-1848 historical conditions for analysing formal practice in European art music at the turn of the twentieth century.
At the School of Music, Kelvin will conduct a large-scale study of tonality in East Asia between the Self-Strengthening Movement of 1861 and the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Titled ‘Tonality from the East: Transcultural Making of Modern Music in East Asia, 1861–1949’, the project probes the cultural dynamics in the negotiation between traditional musical ideas and Western tonal practice in the region and develops a model of analysis to account for the resulting hybridised tonal language, which laid the foundation for modern East Asian music. Through a corpus analysis of over 120 works from China, Japan and Taiwan, it seeks to offer an alternative understanding of tonal practice in East Asia and to explore new ways of thinking about tonality since 1900 as a global concept.
