Annika Forkert
GRNCM Course Leader and Lecturer in Music
Magistra Artium, PhD, FHEA
Email: [email protected]
- GRNCM Course leader
- Member of Academic Board
- Study Strategies Tutor
- Coordinator of Music in Context 1 & 2
Annika is a Lecturer in Music at the RNCM with research interests in the aesthetics, history, and analysis of: British music since 1900, microtonal music, serial music and modernism, and female composers. In 2023, her monograph Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music was published by Cambridge University Press; earlier that year, her chapter on Vaughan Williams’s film music appeared in D. Grimley and B. Adams’s Vaughan Williams and his World (Chicago University Press). Her next book, co-authored with Kenneth Smith (University of Liverpool), will be about Franz Schreker’s operas.
Annika holds a PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Magister Artium from Humboldt-Universität Berlin in Musicology and Philosophy. She also studied at Heidelberg University and Halle/Wittenberg University (Piano Pedagogy).
After her PhD, she was awarded a post-doctoral Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Bristol for a three-year project on Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark. Before her appointment at the RNCM, Annika was a Lecturer in Musicology at Liverpool Hope University, teaching a range of music history, analysis, aesthetics at UG and PG level.
Annika has also worked as a regular author of programme notes for Bavarian Radio and other orchestras and ensembles, and as a translator, speaker, and consultant for European music festivals and orchestras.
Current and Future Research
- Monograph (Cambridge University Press, 2023): Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark. The Orchestration of Progress in Twentieth-Century British Music.
- Co-authored monograph in preparation: Franz Schreker’s Operas (with Kenneth Smith, University of Liverpool)
- History and analysis: microtonal music, British twentieth-century music, female composers, musical modernism
- Collaboration in the arts
Research Funding
Annika’s research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust (postdoctoral 3-year fellowship); and by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst DAAD, Fazit Trust Germany, and Crosslands Scholarship, Royal Holloway (doctoral grants). She has also been awarded small grants from the Society for Music Analysis, Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts, and the Raymond Williams Library Retreat Grant.
Undergraduate Teaching
- Music in Context 1 (coordinator and tutor)
- Music in Context 2 (coordinator and tutor in Music since 1900, Contemporary Musicology, Diversity & Identity)
- Theory 1 (tutor)
- Theory 2 (tutor)
- Musicology Electives (coordinator): Female Composers in Perspective, Musicology Pathway supervision
Postgraduate Teaching
PGT dissertation supervision (opera, music & philosophy)
Research Supervision
PGR supervision and director of studies
I welcome enquiries regarding doctoral research projects in my fields of expertise: British twentieth-century music, female composers, microtonal music, musical modernism.
Selected Outputs
Authored Books
Annika Forkert, Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Journal Articles
Annika Forkert, ‘Microtonal Restraint’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 145 (2020), 75-118.
Annika Forkert, ‘Lutyens in Liverpool’, The Musical Times, 160 (2019), 91-98.
Annika Forkert, ‘”Always a European”: Edward Clark’s Musical Work’, The Musical Times, 159 (2018), 55-80.
Annika Forkert, ‘Magical Serialism: Modernist Enchantment in Elisabeth Lutyens’s O saisons, ô châteaux!’, Twentieth Century Music, 14 (2017), 271-303.
Chapters in Books
Forthcoming: Annika Forkert, ‘Musik im Theater in England’, in Handbuch der Schauspielmusik, ed. Antje Tumat and Anna Ricke, (J.B. Metzler, 2024)
Forthcoming: ‘Reanimating the Genre’, in The Symphony in Britain and Ireland since 1900: A Critical History, ed. Nicholas Jones (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Annika Forkert, ‘“Finest of the Fine Arts”: Vaughan Williams and Film’, in Ralph Vaughan Williams and His World, ed. by Daniel Grimley and Byron Adams, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2023), pp.107-134.
Annika Forkert, ‘Savage Minds in British Early-Twentieth Century Music’, in Musics with and after Tonality. Mining the Gap, ed. by Paul Fleet, (Routledge, 2022), pp.33-53.
Annika Forkert, ‘Das Biest und die Schöne. Symphonien Nr. 4 & 5’, in MusikKonzepte Ralph Vaughan Williams, ed. by Ulrich Tadday, (Munich: Edition text&kritik, 2018), pp.45-62.
Annika Forkert, ‘Beauty among Beasts? From Walton to Maconchy to Britten’, in Elizabeth Maconchy. Music as an Impassioned Argument, ed. by Christa Brüstle and Danielle Sofer, (Vienna, Graz et al.: Universal Edition, 2018), pp.63-85.
Annika Forkert, ‘Musical Modernism in the “Land without Music”? The Limits in Elgar and Holst’, in Jahrbuch für euopäische Ethnologie, (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Wissenschaft, 2012), pp.123-144.
Dictionary Entries
Searle, Humphrey. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (online). Bärenreiter. 2018.
Professional Activity
Annika is the founder and coordinator of the RMA Mentoring Scheme, which launched in 2020 and supports musicologists (especially early-career), music practitioners and independent researchers with a background in music interested in developing their profile towards an academic career.
She is also the co-maintainer of the Golden Pages for Musicologists (with Timothy Summers, RHUL).
From 2019 to 2021, she was the first dedicated Early-Career Council member of the Royal Musical Association (2019-2021), where she has served on the Publications, Search, and Awards Committees. She also served on the Memerbship and Reviews committees of the North American British Music Studies Association (2019-2023).
Conference organisation:
- Conf. Committee, Women’s Work in Music, Bangor 2023
- Progr. Committee, Music since 1900, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire 2022
- Conf. Committee, Women’s Work in Music, Bangor 2021
- Conf. Committee, Women’s Work in Music, Bangor 2019
- Progr. Committee, Royal Musical Association Conference, Bristol 2018
- Conf. Committee, Women’s Work in Music, Bangor 2017
- Convenor, Collaborating Couples in 20th-Century Arts, Bristol 2017
- Progr. Committee, History and Practice/MAC, Nottingham 2016
- Progr. Committee, Critical Theory for Musicology, London 2016
- Progr. Committee, Women in Music Since 1913, Liverpool Hope 2015
Conference presentations (selection):
- ‘Beethoven or Schoenberg? Edward Clark, Berlin, and the BBC’s Orchestras’: Berlin and the BBC, Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-University Berlin, 2022
- ‘Rebecca Clarke’s Bricolage”: RMA Annual Meeting Newcastle, 2021
- ‘Elisabeth Lutyens’s Horror: Hidden Figures in Screen Music and Sound, Royal Holloway London [virtual], 2020
- ‘Kollaboration als Herausforderung. Lebensläufe von Kunstpaaren in zwanzigsten Jahrhundert’: Invited paper at Perspektiven der Paarforschung, Research Cluster Kunstpaare, FU Berlin, 2019.
- ‘The Héloïse Complex in a Modernist Collaboration: Elisabeth Lutyens & Edward Clark’: American Musicological Society, San Antonio, TX, 2018.
- ‘Women Working in Music: States of Research’: Panel Convenor, Annual Meeting of the Royal Musical Association, Bristol 2018.
- ‘The Composer’s Voice in Contemporary Music Scholarship’: Roundtable Contributor, Writing about Contemporary Artists, Surrey 2017.
- ‘Rounding up the Geniuses: Collaborating Couples’: Beyond Genius and Muse: Collaborating Couples in 20th-Century Arts, Bristol 2017.
- ‘Towards a Critical Biography of Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark’: Music Department Research Seminar: Liverpool Hope 2018, Glasgow 2017, Anglia Ruskin University 2017, Bristol 2015.
- ‘Modernism’s Missing Link: Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark’s Collaborations’: Royal Musical Association, Liverpool 2017, North American British Music Studies Association Conference, Syracuse 2016.
- ‘“The Subject of Women’s Music Has Bitched Me All My Life”: Elisabeth Lutyens and Canonicity’: Interdisciplinary Seminar Series Women and the Canon, Oxford 2016 [Podcast on https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/gender-and-authority-seminar-5-annika-forkert-university-bristol]
- ‘Serialism Enchanted: The Theosophical Basis of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Serialism’: Theosophy and the Arts, Columbia University 2015.
- ‘William Walton and/against/beyond the Sitwells’: Poetry and Collaboration in the Age of Modernism, Trinity College Dublin 2015.
- ‘British Musical Modernism Defended against its Devotees’: The State We’re In: Researching post-1900 British Music, Surrey 2015, RMA Study Day Envisioning Modernity, Durham 2014.
- ‘Significant Form and Form as a Signifier’: Modernist Musics and Political Aesthetics, Nottingham 2015.
- ‘The Struggle between British Modernists and the Establishment in Mid-Twentieth Century England’: Dreams of Germany, German, Historical Institute London 2015.
- ‘Beauty among Beasts? From Walton to Maconchy to Britten’: Passionately Intellectual, Intellectually Passionate: Elizabeth Maconchy, Graz 2014.
- ‘Eine Moderne wider den guten Geschmack’: Music Department Research Seminar Series, Hannover 2014, Gesellschaft für Musikforschung Annual Meeting, Dresden 2013.
- ‘British Musical Modernism and Adorno’s Musicological Ideology’: Word and Music Association Forum Annual Conference, Stockholm 2012.
