Staff profile

I am a music historian interested in the connection between music and politics. Presently, I am working on a book project, tentatively entitled ‘The Japanese Empire’s German Art Music: 1910–1945’. This study utilizes German-, Japanese-, and Chinese-language sources to analyze the musical and musico-political activities of a network of interconnected individuals in Germany, Japan, and Taiwan during the first half of the twentieth century. Through this research, I aim to assert a clear connection between Western, specifically German, art music and the state- and empire-building initiatives of Japan during that period. Furthermore, I am currently writing several book chapters of varying sizes for projects on global music history, music and transpacific studies, and the use of metaphor in music. I am also co-editing a volume on global musicology (with Vera Wolkowicz, and under contract with Palgrave Macmillan).

Previously, a winner of the Royal Musical Association’s Jerome Roche Prize (2020) for ‘an outstanding article by a scholar in the early stages of their career’, my historically informed hermeneutic reading of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck constitutes part of my doctoral dissertation on representations of masculinity in Austro-German opera in and around the years of the First World War. Sections of this work have been revised and published in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.

My work has been generously supported by a range of funders. Earlier iterations of my present monograph project proposals have received a ‘Seal of Excellence’ from the European Commission (2020), a Direct Grant from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2021), and a Grant Seedcorn Fund from Durham University (2022). My doctoral work was funded by the DAAD, the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, and the Austrian Culture Forum New York, to name but a few.

As an editor, I am responsible for the review sections of the Royal Musical Association’s two flagship journals: the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle. I am also part of the curatorial team of the American Musicological Society’s digital publication platform, Musicology Now.

As a citizen of musicology and its sister disciplines, I am invested in building equitable and geographically diverse scholarly networks. I co-founded and presently co-organise (with John Gabriel) an Asian-German Studies in Music Working Group affiliated with the International Musicological Society Global Music History Study Group, and I co-chair (with Kunio Hara) the American Musicological Society’s Global East Asian Music Research Study Group. I also serve as Secretary for the newly established International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

Prior to joining Durham University as Assistant Professor in Musicology in January 2022, I was Research Assistant Professor in Musicology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before then, halfway across the world again, I taught as Sessional Lecturer in Music at the University of Toronto, where I obtained my PhD in Musicology (2020). I hold an MPhil in Musicology (2013) from the University of Oxford, and a BMus in Music (2011) from Royal Holloway, University of London. 

• 2023: Kurt Weill Prize: awarded biennially by the Kurt Weill Foundation for 'distinguished scholarship in the disciplines of music, theater, dance, literary criticism and history addressing music theater since 1900 (including opera)'
• 2020: Jerome Roche Prize: awarded annually by the Royal Musical Association 'for an outstanding article by a scholar in the early stages of their career'

Book review

• Hsieh, A. (2023). Review of ‘Dialogues: Towards decolonising music and dance studies’, edited by Tan Sooi Beng & Marcia Ostashewski. Ethnomusicology Forum, 32(3), 461-466. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2023.2270986
• Hsieh, A. (2016). Review of Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds. By Peter Franklin. Music and Letters, 97(4), 659-661. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcw091
• Hsieh, A. (2016). Review of Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology. Edited by Philip Purvis. Music and Letters, 97(3), https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcw062

Journal Article

• Hsieh, A. (2022). Jewish Difference and Recovering ‘Commedia’: Erich W. Korngold’s ‘Die tote Stadt’ in Post-First World War Austria. Music and Letters, 103(4), 685-707. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcac043
• Hsieh, A. (2022). The Mask of Bourgeois Masculinity and Franz Schreker’s _Die Gezeichneten_. Cambridge Opera Journal, 34(3), 338-363. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954586722000246
• Hsieh, A. (2019). Lyrical Tension, Collective Voices: Masculinity in Alban Berg's _Wozzeck_. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 144(2), https://doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2019.1651496