Staff profile
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Job title: Senior Lecturer
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Dept: Music and Performing Arts
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Tel: 01227 782735
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Campus: Canterbury
BMus, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Music, Director of Early Music Ensemble
Dr Rawson is a musicologist and performer who specialises in music before c.1800 and with a particular interest in Czech and English music.
Robert organises the department's annual series of Research Seminars in Music, the details of which can be found here|.
His major area of study was Early Music for his BMus at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA) where he also studied the double bass with Stuart Sankey and the viola da gamba with Enid Sutherland and early-music subjects with Ed Parmentier. In the USA he performed with Jaap Schroeder and David Daniels, among many others before moving to London in 1996 to continue viola da gamba studies with Sarah Cunningham. In 2001 he completed his Ph.D. at Royal Holloway (under Tim Carter and Geoff Chew) on the subject of the Moravian viol virtuoso and composer Gottfried Finger (c.1655-1730). Robert has performed throughout Europe and the USA as a bass violist or bassist with many leading figures in the period-instrument scene. He is also a conductor of early music, having directed numerous public concerts of seventeenth and eighteenth-century repertoire.
Robert has taught at Royal Holloway (University of London) and Cambridge University in addition to being a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and Trinity College of Music in London. The central aim of his work is to combine scholarship with performing, as this can be seen in his collaborations with Christopher Hogwood, Monica Huggett, Peter Holman, Crispian Steele-Perkins and many others. He is widely regarded as one of the leading experts on early Czech music, and in 2004 was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, held at Cambridge University, to write a book on the subject (forthcoming). He has recently been invited by Oxford University Press to act as guest editor of a special volume of Early Music devoted to music in the Czech lands (to be published in Nov. 2012).
From 2005-2007 Dr Rawson worked on the RISM project, jointly organised by the British Library and Royal Holloway, to catalogue early collections of British cathedrals and chapels. He studied and inventoried music manuscript collections (1550-1800) of Worcester Cathedral and St John's College Cambridge. A number of important discoveries were made, including the discovery of missing parts from several motets by Richard Derring at St Johns, since published in the Musica Britanica series by Jonathan Wainwright.
Robert has published numerous scholarly articles and other contributions in the UK, USA, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Poland and Australia, including leading journals such as Early Music, Eighteenth Century Music and Early Music Performer. He has also contributed so several high-profile reference volumes including The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In 2005 he joined forces as a performer with Czech viol virtuoso Petr Wagner to record the first ever CD devoted to the viola da gamba music of G. Finger (c.1655-1730) which earned the coveted five stars from Goldberg magazine, CD of the month in Harmonie and was described in Early Music as 'a revelation'. In 2007 this recording was also featured on BBC Radio 3's The Early Music Show. Robert continues to perform regularly in concerts, recordings and radio broadcasts on the bass viol and the double bass and is joint founder (with David Wright and Ben Sansom) of the acclaimed period-instrument ensemble, The Harmonious Society of Tickle-Fiddle Gentlemen – described by Sean Rafferty on BBC Radio 3 as "purveyors of exhilarating and uplifting music".
Dr Rawson is available to supervise research students at the MMus and Ph.D. levels across a variety of subjects, particularly relating to music and performance before c.1800 and music in the British Isles and Central Europe.
Current Ph.D. students: Frances Jones, 'The Influence of Rustic Alphorn Players on the Classical Composer'.
Full details of Dr Rawson's publications and other outputs can be found here|.
Member of the Royal Musical Association and The Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.