Thomas Schmidt

Thomas Schmidt is Head of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures and Professor of Music. He studied at the University of Heidelberg and as a Fulbright Scholar in Chapel Hill. He was awarded his PhD and Habilitation from Heidelberg and was Visiting Professor at the University of Frankfurt before moving to the UK in 2005 as Professor and Chair of Music at Bangor University. From 2012, he was Professor of Music at The University of Manchester (later also leading the Division of Art History, Drama and Music), and from 2017 Dean of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield, before returning to Manchester in his current role in 2021. He was a Heisenberg Senior Research Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Illinois and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Since 2009 he is a member of the Academia Europaea.

Main research interests are in music of the 15th/16th and the 18th/19th centuries. In the Renaissance period, his main focus has been on word-music relationships and in the materiality, creation and transmission of polyphonic sources. In the Classical/Romantic period, his focus has been on Felix Mendelssohn, with editions of the major symphonies for the Complete Edition of the composer’s work. He is the author of three monographs – on Mendelssohn (Stuttgart 1996), the fifteenth-century motet (Turnhout 2003) and the sonata (Kassel 2006, English version Cambridge 2011) – and has directed the AHRC-funded project on 'Production and Reading of Music Sources' (www.proms.ac.uk).

Editorial and advisory board roles include the Commission of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, Early Music, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and Revue de Musicologie. He is currently preparing a catalogue of the music manuscripts of the Fondo Cappella Sistina at the Vatican Library, and a monograph on timbre and texture in nineteenth-century chamber music.