Staff profile

In 2024, I completed my PhD in Musicology and Analysis titled: Music Against Death: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in British Composers’ Musical Responses to the First World War, 1915-1921 (https://etheses.dur.ac.uk/16178/). My thesis  challenges the enduring myth of British composers' wartime musical silence by examining works that resist reductive patriotic or commemorative framings, instead articulating the complex affective and existential dimension to wartime death in music. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in music analysis, cultural history, thanatology, and memory and trauma studies, the thesis develops a ‘music against death’ phenomenon: a symbolic, aesthetic, and ritualised response to mortality and the fragile and contingent nature of modern subjecthood. In so doing, it demonstrates how composers drew upon inherited musical languages of mourning not simply to console but to negotiate the disintegration of meaning and identity in the wake of mass trauma, thus positioning music as a medium through which the precarious modern self could be reimagined and reconstituted.

More broadly, my research specialism lies in British Music of the 19th and 20th centuries and at the intersection of death, trauma, and memory studies. I hold an Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, an Associate Fellowship of Van Mildert College, and am delighted to be an Advisory Board member of The Centre for Death and Life Studies. I was the recipient of an inaugral DCAD Fellowship from 2021-23 and have previously taught harmony and counterpoint at Durham.

My forthcoming publications include Music, Mortality, and Memory, co-edited with Professor Douglas Davies (pub. January 2026) for Brill's Death in History, Culture, and Society series, a 4-volume set of primary sources with critical commentaries on Long Nineteenth Century Loss, Memory, and Mourning: 1780-1914 for Routledge (pub. November 2025) with Professor Mark Sandy, Professor Geoffrey Scarre, Professor Douglas Davies, and Ricky Whitefield, and I am currently writing on 'Form and Concept in the Choral Works' for a new Cambridge Compaion to Charles Villiers Stanford.

Beyond research, I am a Lay Clerk at Southwell Minster and a consultant grant writer for charities and arts organisations. I am delighted to remain part of such a lively and intellectually ambitious community of scholars and always welcome enquiries into research and/or performance collaborations from students, staff, those beyond the institution and, indeed, the academy, so do feel free to get in touch.

PhD Thesis

McCullough, Matthew ,Martin, Ezekiel (2024) Music Against Death: Languages of Loss,Mourning, and Memory in British Composers' Musical Responses to the First World War, 1915-1921,Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/16178/

(Please contact me for the full text)

Conference Organisation

Music, Mortality, and Ritual, Centre for Death and Life Studies, Durham University, 15 May 2021 [Co-convenor]

Music, Monuments, and Memory, Centre for Death and Life Studies, Durham University, 13 November 2021 [Co-convenor]

Conference Papers

'Tone and Tonality: Performing Social Values in British Post-War Musical Commemoration', Music, Mortality, and Ritual, Centre for Death and Life Studies, Durham University, United Kingdom, 15 May 2021

'Requiem for a Dream — Universality, Sonic Death Ritual, and Associative Symbolism in Sir Arthur Bliss' Morning Heroes', 57th Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, Newcastle University, United Kingdon, 14-16 September 2021

'Sounding the Architecture of Grief: Requiem, Rhetoric, and Embodied Experience', Music, Monuments, and Memory,Centre for Death and Life Studies, Durham University, United Kingdom, 13 November 2021

'A Sodality of Dionysus: The Elizabethan Legacy of the Eynsford Cottage Period in Ernest Moeran’s Large-Scale Works', BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference, University of Plymouth 6-8 January 2022

'"Our nerves are even yet not completely healed" – Stanford’s At The Abbey Gate: Form; Tone; and Reception.' Joint SMI and ICTM-IE Postgraduate Conference, Dublin City University, Ireland, 14-15 January 2022

'Sounding the Architecture of Grief: Requiem, Rhetoric, and Embodied Experience', The Tenth Biennial North American British Music Studies Association Conference 2022, Illinois State University, IL, United States of America, 21-24 July 2022

‘Music Against Death – British Music and the First World War, 1915-1921', Music, Medicine and History Network, Newcastle University, United Kingdom, September 2025 (invited talk).

• 19th- and 20th-Century British and Irish Music and Culture
• Music, Mortality, and Memory
• Death, Culture, and Society
• Music, Conflict, and Trauma
• Harmony and Counterpoint
• Theory and Analysis

• 2023: Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA):
• 2022: Music and Letters Trust Grant:
• 2022: NABMSA Byron Adams Travel Grant:
• 2021: RMA Oldman Grant:
• 2021: DCAD Fellowship (2021-23):
• 2020: Van Mildert College Trust PhD Scholarship:
• 2020: Associate Fellowship of Van Mildert College:
• 2019: 1st Prize - British Music Society 40th Anniversary Essay Competition:

Chapter in book

• Sounding the Architecture of Grief: Requiem, Rhetoric and Embodied Experience
  
  McCullough, M. (2022). Sounding the Architecture of Grief: Requiem, Rhetoric and Embodied Experience. In M. Bennett, J. Shadrack, & G. Levy (Eds.), Embodying the Music and Death Nexus: Consolations, Salvations and Transformations. (pp. 145-158). Emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-766-520221010

Edited book

• Literary, Cultural, and Material Responses to Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914.
  
  Davies, D. J., McCullough, M., Sandy, M., Scarre, G., & Whitefield, R. (Eds.). (in press). Literary, Cultural, and Material Responses to Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914. Routledge.
• Historical, Political, and Public Responses to Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914.
  
  Davies, D. J., McCullough, M., Sandy, M., Scarre, G., & Whitefield, R. (Eds.). (in press). Historical, Political, and Public Responses to Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914. Routledge.
• Music, Mortality, Memory
  
  Davies, D. J., & McCullough, M. (Eds.). (n.d.). Music, Mortality, Memory [Contracted by publisher]. Brill Academic Publishers.

Journal Article

• ‘An Art That Reaches Beyond the World’: Sir Arthur Bliss and Music as Spirituality
  
  McCullough, M. (2022). ‘An Art That Reaches Beyond the World’: Sir Arthur Bliss and Music as Spirituality. Religions, 13(12), Article 1186. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13121186
• Cecil Gray: The Last Romantic
  
  McCullough, M. (2021). Cecil Gray: The Last Romantic. British Music., 42(1), 1-16.
• A History and Analysis of Gerald Finzi's Dies Natalis
  
  McCullough, M. (2019). A History and Analysis of Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis. British Music., 41(2019/1), 40-57.