Ian Biddle (he/him or they/them) is Professor of Music History at Newcastle University. He is is a cultural theorist and musicologist, working on a range of topics in music- and sound-related areas, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work ranges from the cultural history of music and masculinity, theorising music’s intervention in communities and subjectivities, sound, soundscapes and urban experience, and the politics of noise. He has interests in memory studies, sound studies, Italian workerist and autonomist theory, psychoanalysis and theoretical approaches to ‘affective’ states. He is co-founder and co-ordinating editor (with Richard Middleton) of the journal Radical Musicology.
Ian graduated from Nottingham University in 1988 and completed his PhD at Newcastle in 1995, ‘Autonomy, Ontology and the Ideal: Music Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-Century German Thought’, under the supervision of John Rink, Ronald Woodley an David Clarke. He has also studied composition with Roman Haubenstock-Romati at the Hochschule (now Universität) für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna and Musicology at the Abteilung für Musikwissenschaft at Vienna University. Since then he has taught at Newcastle and UEA Norwich, contributing to the teaching of analysis, cultural history and musical aesthetics and theory, music and politics, the operas of Leoš Janácek, music and gender, music in the Holocaust and music and queer theory. He has published on music theory and aesthetics in the nineteenth century, German popular music, music theory, psychoanalysis, the Holocaust and gender and sexuality.
His recent publications include:
Articles
Biddle I. Romance cartographies: flamenco articulations of queer spaces in urban Andalusia. Radical Musicology 2019, 7, n/a.
Biddle I. Madrid’s great sonic transformation: Sound, noise, and the auditory commons of the city in the nineteenth century. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 2019, 20(3), 227-240.
Biddle I. Music, Sound, and Affect in Yiddish-language Holocaust Cinema: The Posttraumatic Community in Natan Gross’s Unzere kinder(1948). Music and the Moving Image 2018, 11(3), 40-59.
Biddle I. Visitors, or The Political Ontology of Noise. Radical Musicology 2009, 4, n/a.
Biddle I. Love thy neighbour? The Political Economy of Musical Neighbours. Radical Musicology 2007, 2, -.
Biddle I. On the Radical in Musicology. Radical Musicology 2006, 1, -.
Biddle I. ‘Vox electronica: Nostalgia, Irony and Cyborgian Vocalities in Kraftwerk’s Radioaktivität and Autobahn‘. Twentieth Century Music 2004, 1(1), 81-100.
Biddle I. Policing Masculinity: Schumann, Berlioz and the Gendering of the Music-critical Idiom. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 1999, 124(2), 196-220.
Biddle, I. ‘Das Ich, das Begehren und die Wiedergeburt des Komponisten: Neuere Werke von Roger Redgate’ [‘The Ego, desire and the rebirth of the compser function: Roger Redgate’s recent compositions’]. Musik und Ästhetik 1999, 3(12), 5-25.
Authored Book
Biddle I. Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History: The Austro-German Tradition from Hegel to Freud. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011.
Edited Books
Gibson K, Biddle I, ed. Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918. London: Routledge, 2016.
Biddle I, Thompson M, ed. Sound, Music Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. New York: Continuum, 2013.
Biddle I, ed. Music and Identity Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012.
Biddle I, Gibson K, ed. Masculinity and Western Musical Practice. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009.
Biddle I, Knights V, ed. Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local. London: Ashgate, 2006.
The Flamenco Effect 