Jeremy Barham is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Surrey, UK. He is a graduate of the University of Durham, and his research broadly concerns the meaning and cultural history of music, the nature of interdisciplinarity, and music’s relation to critical theory. These themes are pursued within three primary areas of interest: Gustav Mahler and early modernism; screen music; and jazz.

With Mahler he focuses on the composer’s cultural engagement and the ways in which this can be articulated musicologically and analytically. He is editor of, and contributor to, Perspectives on Gustav Mahler (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (2007), and Rethinking Mahler (2017, Oxford University Press) – a volume developed from the Mahler Centenary Conference, ‘Mahler: Contemporary of the Past?’, which he convened at Surrey in 2011. He is guest editor and contributor for two journal issues devoted to Mahler:  19th-Century Music, ‘Mahler, Sex, and Gender’ (2024) and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, ‘Mahler: Centenary Commentaries on Musical Meaning’ (2011) in which his own contribution addresses the semantic (re-)programming of Mahler’s music through the agency of film. He has also written on Mahler’s political, philosophical, and literary contexts in Naturlauf: Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La Grange at His Ninetieth Birthday (2016), the Stephen Hefling Festschrift volume of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (2018), and Mahler in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is currently working on the monograph Post-Centenary Mahler: Revaluing Musical Meaning which analyses the composer’s output from socio-political, philosophical, literary, psychological, and theatrical perspectives; editing, with Yulia Kreinin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a volume of Russian scholarship on Mahler, translated for the first time; and, with Alessandro Cecchi of the University of Pisa, producing a journal issue for Music, Sound, and the Moving Image on the use of Mahler’s music in film prior to Visconti’s famous Death in Venice.

In screen music, Jeremy researches in narrative and diegetic issues, temporality, intertextuality, appropriation, jazz on screen, and experimental film. The monograph for CUP, Music, Time and the Moving Image, is in progress, and he has published historical analyses and theorizations of pre-existent music in film for 19th-Century Music (on Schumann), Music and the Moving Image (on Mahler), The Musical Quarterly (on Sci-Fi film), Nineteenth-Century Music Review (on Mahler) and the volume Terror Tracks (on Kubrick’s The Shining). In 2013 he completed a BA-funded archival research project in the music of the first sound films in Germany, and in 2014 convened the international conference ‘Hollywood’s Musical Contemporaries and Competitors in the Early Sound Film Era’ at Surrey in order to investigate neglected global repertoires of early screen music outside the US/Hollywood orbit, and from which his edited volume The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era (2024) is derived. Jeremy has contributed book chapters on jazz in film to The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, on experimental visualizations of Mahler’s music to The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (OUP) which he co-edited with Holly Rogers, and on the philosophy of live-score film screenings for The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening.

In the field of jazz, Jeremy is primarily concerned with issues of musical analysis, historiography, the mediatizing of jazz, and the jazz-‘classical’ relationship, on which he has written in the Jazz Research Journal and The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound. He is series editor of the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz, whose ninth volume, on Gerry Mulligan’s 1950s Quartet was published in 2023.

He has undertaken British-Academy-funded research in Vienna, Berlin, Wiesbaden, Paris, and Philadelphia, and has been the recipient of five British Academy scholarships and bursaries, a DAAD scholarship, and grants from the Film Music Foundation (California), RMA, IMR, Music & Letters Trust, Austrian Cultural Forum, IAS, and GSMD in support of his research. In 2009 he was awarded the Donald Tovey Memorial Prize by the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, in recognition of his work on Mahler. Jeremy is Director of the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research (IAGMR), a research group established at Surrey in 2018 to foster new and transformational scholarship in canonical and neglected repertoire of all types and from all periods of history in Germanophone lands. Together with its Honorary President, Professor Erik Levi, he edits an associated book series with Routledge: Rethinking Austrian and German Music, whose second volume – a collection of the writings on Mahler by Julius Korngold in Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse, edited and translated for the first time by Michael Haas – will be published this year.