Mark Hutchinson
Senior Lecturer and Course leader, MA in Music: Piano Studies

Profile

Biography

Mark Hutchinson studied music to doctoral level at the University of York, specialising in composition, contemporary music and music analysis, as well as performing widely as an piano accompanist and oboist. His book Coherence in New Music: Experience, Aesthetics, Analysis (Ashgate, 2016) uses creative metaphors and ideas taken from a variety of different disciplines to analyse recent music from the classical tradition. Mark leads the Piano Studies pathway of the MA in Music at the University of York, helping exceptional pianists to enrich their performances through a broader understanding of questions of context, history and form. He also runs the University Piano Ensemble, and serves as an accompanist for recitals at undergraduate, MA and doctoral level.

Outside of his teaching and research he is active as a piano accompanist: he has played within the Late Music concert series in York, and the University of York concert series, as well as accompanying numerous student recitals and diplomas for ABRSM and Trinity/Guildhall. 

Research

Overview

• Analysis of 20th and 21st-century music 
• Relationships between music, literature and philosophy 
• Henri Dutilleux, Tōru Takemitsu, György Kurtág, Kaija Saariaho, Hans Zender, Thomas Adès
• Musical borrowing and intertextual meaning

Publications

Full publications list

Books

• Coherence in New Music: Experience, Aesthetics, Analysis. London: Routledge, 2016.

Articles and book chapters

• Partnership in Piano Duet Playing’ (with Elizabeth Haddon). In The Chamber Musician in the Twenty-First Century (ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack), 181–204. Basel: MDPI, 2022.
• ‘‘Strange and Dead the Ghosts Appear’: Mythic Absence in Hölderlin, Adorno and Kurtág’. Chapter accepted for inclusion in forthcoming volume Intertextuality in Music since 1900 (ed. Paulo Ferreira de Castro and Federico Celestini). 
• ‘Imagined Structures: Creative Approaches towards Teaching Musical Analysis’ (with Tim Howell). In Creative Teaching for Creative Learning in Higher Academic Music Education, edited by Liz Haddon and Pamela Burnard, 153–67. London: Routledge, 2016. 
• ‘Empathy in Piano Duet Rehearsal and Performance’ (with Elizabeth Haddon). Empirical Music Review 10 (2015). 
• ‘Dreams, Gardens, Mirrors: Layers of Narrative in Takemitsu’s Quotation of Dream’. Contemporary Music Review, 33.4 (2014): 428–446.
• ‘Snapshots in Sound: Mystère de l’instant and the Legacy of Moment Form’. Contemporary Music Review, 29.5 (2011): 497–512.

Reviews

• Review of Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson (eds), Transformations of Musical Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2015). Tempo 70.279 (2017): 101–3. 
• Review of Judy Lochhead, Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music (Routledge, 2016). Tempo 70.278 (2016): 104–8. 
• Review of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, http://airmail.calendar/2015-11-23%2012:00:00%20GMT. Tempo 70.276 (2016): 81–3. 
• Review of Jonathan Goldman, The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez: Writings and Compositions (Cambridge UP, 2014). Tempo 69.272 (2015): 94–6.

Conference papers and presentations

• RMA Annual Conference, September 2020 (online): ‘Dialogues with Diabelli: style, memory and identity in Zender’s 33 Veränderungen über 33 Veränderungen’.
• Spectralisms international conference, March 2017 (University of Oxford): ‘Stairways in the dark: sound, syntax and the sublime in Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain’. 
• Keeping Time? RMA study day, June 2016 (University of York): ‘Wandering through history: distorted temporalities in Zender’s Schubert’.
• Composition seminar, February 2016 (University of York): ‘Tracing the night sky: coherent constellations in Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit’. 
• Panel member at pre-concert table ronde, February 2016 (RCM, London), with Kenneth Hesketh, Caroline Potter and Caroline Rae: ‘Il faut tuer le père (mais on ne doit pas piétiner le cadavre): Dutilleux's Stylistic Journey’. 
• Musical Modernity, the Beautiful and the Sublime, conference, October 2015 (University of Aberdeen): ‘Stairways in the dark: sound, syntax and the sublime in Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain’. 
• International Conference: Intertextuality in Music since 1900, March 2015 (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon): ‘‘Strange and dead the ghosts appear’: mythic absence in Hölderlin and Kurtág’. 
• Memory in Post-1980s Music: History, Form, Perception, RMA study day, February 2014 (University of York): ‘‘Immer ins Ungebundene gehet eine Sehnsucht’: mythic absence in Hölderlin and Kurtág’. 
• Music and Empathy, SEMPRE study day, November 2013 (University of Hull): ‘Empathy in piano duet rehearsal’ (with Liz Haddon). 
• International Conference on Music Since 1900, September 2013 (Liverpool Hope): ‘Strolling through a formal garden: shape and teleology in Tōru Takemitsu’s How slow the Wind’. 
• With Four Hands: Music for Two Pianists, June 2013 (IMR, London): ‘Partners in Time: establishing a new duet partnership’ (with Elizabeth Haddon).
• Creative Teaching for Creative Learning in Higher Academic Music Education, HEA seminar day, May 2013 (University of York): ‘Imagined structures: creative approaches towards teaching musical analysis’.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Programme Leader, BA Music
• Approaching the Contemporary: Western art music after 1980 
• On Late Style 
• Performance coaching: pianists, duos/accompanists and woodwind
• Musical Borrowing 

Postgraduate

• Course leader, MA in Music: Piano Studies