Ian Pace

Ian Pace is a concert pianist, musicologist, and Professor of Music at City University, London. He studied at Chetham's School of Music, Oxford University, The Juilliard School, and Cardiff University, where his PhD was on the reconstruction of post-war West German new music during the early allied occupation, and its roots in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. He is also a campaigner and researcher on the subject of abuse in musical education.

He has played in 25 countries, recorded over 40 CDs, and given over 300 world premieres. He has also played with major orchestras including the Orchestre de Paris under Christoph Eschenbach, the SWR-Orchestra Stuttgart under Rupert Huber, and the Dortmund Philharmonic under Bernhard Kontarsky, and given many workshops and masterclasses, including as a teacher at the festivals in Acanthes, Metz, and Impuls, Graz.

Ian taught first at the London College of Music and Media from 1998 to 2001, where he was co-director of a department for contemporary piano, then as an AHRC Research Fellow at the University of Southampton from 2003 to 2006 (where he wrote a monograph on Michael Finnissy's The History of Photography in Sound). He was Lecturer in Contemporary Musicologies at Dartington College of Arts (now University College Falmouth) from 2007 to 2010, before taking up a position at City University London. Since 2019 he has been Reader in Music, and since 2020 Head of Department.

His research and teaching are wide-ranging and encompass 19th and 20th century musical history and performance, music analysis, opera, Liszt, Brahms, Debussy, aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, critical musicology, the work of the Frankfurt School, music under fascism and communism. Recent publications include several edited volumes: Critical Perspectives on the Music of Michael Finnissy: Bright Futures, edited Ian Pace and Nigel McBride (London: Routledge, 2019); Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists : Challenges, Practices, and Complexities, edited Christopher Wiley and Ian Pace (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). In 2020-21 will follow Writing on Contemporary Musicians: Promotion, Advocacy, Disinterest, Censure, edited Ian Pace and Christopher Wiley (London: Routledge, forthcoming) and Rethinking Contemporary Musicology: Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity, Skills and Deskilling (London: Routledge, forthcoming). He is also working on monographs on musical modernism in Germany during the Weimar Republic and after 1945, and on performance practice in the music of Brahms.