Professor William Drabkin

Professor of Music

Location:Room 2009, Building 2, Highfield Campus

Telephone: +44 (0)23 8059 2821 (internal ex. 22821)

Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 3197

Email: Mail William Drabkin

Summary biography

My main interests are the Classical and Romantic periods, chamber music, and music analysis. In the past I have offered unit courses on late Beethoven, Wagner's Ring cycle, the piano concerto, Mozart's Italian operas, and chamber music from Haydn to Bartók. Currently I teach music analysis to postgraduates and harmony, counterpoint and tonal composition at all undergraduate levels. I have a special interest in composers’ sketches and early drafts, and have recently completed a movement from an Oboe Concerto that Mozart started composing in 1778; this will be performed by Andrew Knights with the Southampton Youth Orchestra in January 2008. Other works of mine have been performed at the Southampton Festival of Music and Drama, and by the Hampshire County Youth Orchestra's double reed ensemble.

My research began in the field of Beethoven sketches, with a dissertation on the last piano sonata, Op. 111. Currently I am completing editions of Beethoven's sketchbooks from 1821 and 1822, a period during which he composed the last two piano sonatas and completed the Missa solemnis. My two-volume edition, in English translation, of Heinrich Schenker's Der Tonwille completes a long-term project to provide scholarly English-language editions of all Schenker's major writings from the 1920s; this was awarded a Special Citation by the Society for Music Theory in 2005. The journal Music Analysis published a transcription and translation of Schenker's Decline of the Art of Composition, a long essay conceived as a a supplement to his Harmonielehre of 1906.

I am Vice-President of the Society for Music Analysis, and Chair of the editorial board of Music Analysis; I also serve on the editorial board of Beethoven Forum, and the Italian-based Ad Parnassum and Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale.