Dr Thomas Metcalf
Junior Anniversary Fellow, October 2022 – July 2023
Dr Thomas Metcalf is a researcher and composer specialising in music and comparative arts from the 20th century to the present day. He achieved his DPhil from Oxford University in 2021 with a thesis entitled Graphical Ekphrasis in Contemporary Music supported by a portfolio of compositions which demonstrate aspects of his theoretical research. The direction of his general postdoctoral work focusses on ideas of aesthetic ‘tension’ (or Derridean ‘lack’) when forging transmedial relationships between music and visual forms. His work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Tempo, Leonardo, The Journal of the Royal College of Organists, Principles of Music Composing, and Question.
Thomas has taught at Oxford since beginning his DPhil in 2018, and in 2021 was appointed to a Junior Teaching Fellowship at the Ashmolean Museum, focussed on interdisciplinary and object-focussed teaching for undergraduates and postgraduates.
For more on Thomas’s work as a composer, see his website: www.thomasmkmetcalf.com
Project Title: Photography and/as Music
This project explores the relationships between photography and/as music composition through a framework of comparative arts, particularly the rhetorical concept of ekphrasis. There is no shortage of music which responds to visual forms, particularly paintings, and a great amount of work has been carried out in fields such as programme music, ekphrastic music, and even computer music, to think about the process and aesthetics of such activities. Photography, however, has remained less prevalent in these studies, despite being of real importance in the field of Visual Studies and Art History. This project aims to address this imbalance, and think about how the specific medium of photography has become entangled with significant musical developments in the 20th century, using composers such as Hector Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), Morton Feldman (1926-1987), Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981), and Fred Frith (b. 1949) to demonstrate this. As well as exploring this central and more theoretical aspect, this project will also incorporate my creative practice as a composer, producing new works which utilise transmedial systems of composition derived from photography.