Staff profile

I am a global music historian interested in the connection between music and politics. My ongoing book project, tentatively entitled ‘The Japanese Empire’s German Art Music, 1910–1945’, draws on German-, Japanese-, and Chinese-language sources to analyse the musico-political activities of a network of interconnected individuals in Germany, Japan, and Taiwan. Employing not only archival research but also global history, biography, and theory of infrastructure as its primary methods and approaches, my study will demonstrate a clear connection between Western, specifically German, art music and the state- and empire-building initiatives of Japan during the first half of the twentieth century.

In addition to my monograph-in-progress, I am currently writing several book chapters of varying sizes for projects on global music history (OUP), global art songs (OUP), music and transpacific studies (Palgrave Macmillan), and the Bandmann Opera Company in Japan (Routledge). I have also been co-editing an essay collection, Global Musicology: Music Histories from ‘Elsewhere’, with Vera Wolkowicz, which is on schedule to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025. Related to my research, I have been part of the Being Human Festival and have organised a sold-out concert thematising the life and career of a highly active touring singer from the twentieth century, Fujiwara Yoshie.

I am invested in building equitable and geographically diverse scholarly networks. I co-founded in 2021 and continue to co-organise (with John Gabriel) an Asian-German Studies in Music Working Group, which is affiliated with the International Musicological Society’s Global History of Music Study Group. I co-chaired (at various points with Kunio Hara, Gavin Lee, Elina Hamilton, and Heeseung Lee) the American Musicological Society’s Global East Asian Music Research Study Group (from 2021 to 2024). I am also a Faculty Affiliate of Project Spectrum, a graduate student-led coalition committed to increasing EDI in music studies since 2020. As Reviews Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle (2021–2025), I have paid special attention to the linguistic and geographical diversity of the reviewers and experimented with the book review as a format (please see, for example, here, here, and here).

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (reference number PR301587). I teach across the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula at Durham and presently co-supervise one PhD student (women opera singers in nineteenth-century Britain). I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students and postdoctoral fellowship applicants on topics related to music and mobility, music and politics, and global music history in the East Asian and Central and Western European contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• 2023: Kurt Weill Prize: awarded biennially by the Kurt Weill Foundation for 'distinguished scholarship in the disciplines of music, theater, dance, literary criticism and history addressing music theater since 1900 (including opera)'
• 2020: Jerome Roche Prize: awarded annually by the Royal Musical Association 'for an outstanding article by a scholar in the early stages of their career'

Book review

• Hsieh, A. (2023). Review of ‘Dialogues: Towards decolonising music and dance studies’, edited by Tan Sooi Beng & Marcia Ostashewski. Ethnomusicology Forum, 32(3), 461-466. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2023.2270986
• Hsieh, A. (2016). Review of Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds. By Peter Franklin. Music and Letters, 97(4), 659-661. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcw091
• Hsieh, A. (2016). Review of Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology. Edited by Philip Purvis. Music and Letters, 97(3), https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcw062

Journal Article

• Hsieh, A. (2022). Jewish Difference and Recovering ‘Commedia’: Erich W. Korngold’s ‘Die tote Stadt’ in Post-First World War Austria. Music and Letters, 103(4), 685-707. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcac043
• Hsieh, A. (2022). The Mask of Bourgeois Masculinity and Franz Schreker’s _Die Gezeichneten_. Cambridge Opera Journal, 34(3), 338-363. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954586722000246
• Hsieh, A. (2019). Lyrical Tension, Collective Voices: Masculinity in Alban Berg's _Wozzeck_. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 144(2), https://doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2019.1651496