Björn Heile

I have come to Glasgow from the University of Sussex, where I spent eight years, more than three of which as Head of Department. Before that, I was at the University of Southampton, where I got my PhD and where I spent another year as Leverhulme Special Research Fellow. My first degree is from Technische Universität Berlin (MA in Musicology and English and American Literature).

I am mostly interested in music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and I am increasingly drawn to integrative appraoches, whereby different forms of music - popular, classical, traditional, jazz, western and non-western - are not studied in isolation from one another but comparatively. It is fair to say that my expertise is greatest in avant-garde and experimental music (notably that of Mauricio Kagel) and jazz.

I am the author of The Music of Mauricio Kagel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and the editor of The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) as well as the co-editor (with Martin Iddon) of Mauricio Kagel bei den Darmstädter Ferienkursen für Neue Musik: Eine Dokumentation (Hofheim: Wolke, 2009). I am also the lead editor of Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen (forthcoming at Oxford University Press).