Useful Information
Martin W Ennis
Austin and Hope Pilkington Fellow in Music, Director of Studies in Music and Director of College Music
Martin Ennis is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Faculty of Music and Fellow and Director of Music at Girton College, Cambridge. He began his higher education as Organ Scholar of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and on graduating pursued further studies firstly at the Musikhochschule in Cologne and latterly back at the University in Cambridge. From 1989–90 he was Director of Music at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and in 1990 he was appointed the inaugural Pilkington Fellow in Music at Girton College. He joined the permanent staff of the Cambridge Music Faculty in 1994. From 2002–2005 he served as Chairman of the Faculty, and he took up this post again in October 2008. In 2009 his commitment to teaching was recognised with the award of one of the University’s highly prestigious Pilkington Prizes.
Martin Ennis combines his university life with a busy career as a performer, specialising as a continuo player. A Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, he has been a prizewinner at several international competitions. In addition to his work as the principal keyboard player of the London Mozart Players he has performed with such groups as the Monteverdi Choir (for its 25th anniversary concert), the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Kölner Bach-Collegium, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, the Allegri String Quartet, the chorus of the Juilliard School in New York and, more recently, as a soloist with St Luke’s Chamber Orchestra in New York. He has made BBC recordings as solo pianist with several chamber groups, and in 1997 made his first concerto recording with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He is also an occasional composer, and his compositions have been performed in venues including Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Royal Albert Hall (in one of the “Promenade” concerts).
During his period as Director of Music he has led the choir of Girton College to competition successes in Japan, and together they have made a number of highly regarded recordings, including broadcasts on Radio Hong Kong and Japanese television. In recent years he has been increasingly active as a freelance conductor, appearing with a variety of orchestras including the London Mozart Players and the Mozart Festival Orchestra. Recent projects have included a performance of Messiah in the Concert Hall of the Forbidden City, Beijing in December 2007 directed from the harpsichord, and workshops and conducting masterclasses in Malaysia in December 2008.
Research Interests
Martin Ennis’s research interests centre on the analysis of music, particularly that of Brahms. However, he has also worked extensively on historicism in the music of the nineteenth century, and in recent years he has specialised in the music of Germany between the two World Wars. In addition, he also teaches a wide range of subjects at undergraduate level, including harmony, counterpoint and advanced keyboard skills.
Recent and current graduate students have worked on Brahms (notions of cyclicity and Brahms’s concept of the “Liederstrauss”; the vocal duets, the reception of Brahms during the Third Reich); Beethoven (coherence in the late string quartets); Schubert (grotesque elements in the Lieder); Berwald (the symphony from a non-German perspective); Weber (music and tuberculosis); Mendelssohn (historicism and the “anxiety of influence”); Schumann (formal problems in the Second Symphony; advanced harmonic syntax); Wagner (Stabreim in the transition years between Lohengrin and Das Rheingold); Strauss (the symphonic poems with reference to the New German school); Mahler (the First Symphony and its lyric roots); the nineteenth-century symphony in London; Furtwängler’s approach to early music; and musicology in the German Democratic Republic.