Dr Amanda Hsieh from our Department of Music has teamed up with Dr Vera Wolkowicz from the University of Glasgow to bring together 10 authors from around the world to ask a timely question: why do we need musicological perspectives beyond our own?

Professor Julian Horton’s new article ‘Corpus Studies, Sonata Typology and the Nineteenth-Century Violin Concerto’ has been published in the prestigious American journal Music Theory Spectrum.

We’ve been awarded £1.7 million to help deliver courses that will increase opportunities for students and support economic growth.

A vibrant week of events (20–23 October 2025) will take place across Durham, exploring Black history, reparative justice, and decolonial thought. Organised as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, the programme brings together scholars, students, and community members for walking tours, film screenings, and keynote lectures that highlight critical conversations around race, memory, and historical responsibility.

Congratulations to Dr Sara Salloum, who has been awarded the RMA Practice Research Prize for 2025.

The Department of Music is proud to announce again its number one ranking in the Complete University Guide 2026.

A recording of the chamber music of Durham alumna Ailsa Dixon (1932–2017) is to be released on 22 August 2025 on the Resonus Classics label, coinciding with the publication of her scores by Composers Edition.

Coldplay, Radiohead or R.E.M. – which band has changed their music the most over the years?

We are delighted to congratulate Dr Zak Eastop on the successful defence of his doctoral thesis “Hybridity, Hierarchy, and Couleur Rabelaisienne: The Afterlives of François Rabelais on the Late Nineteenth-Century Parisian Lyric Stage (1855-1895)”. Zak passed his viva, conducted by Professor Neil Kelly (Oxford) and Dr Tommaso Sabbatini (Bristol), with flying colours in May.

Congratulations! Dr Ian Dickson won the ‘Innovation in Teaching and Learning’ award, for his hugely popular gamification of music theory and techniques.

Congratulations to Thea Constantinou for winning the Music Department’s Undergraduate Prize for 2024/25.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities has been awarded a highly regarded Athena Swan Silver Award, becoming only the second faculty of its kind in the UK to receive this distinction. This milestone acknowledges the significant progress made in advancing gender equality across all departments and highlights a firm commitment to continued improvement through to 2030.