Dr Martin Parker Dixon

Dr Martin Parker Dixon is a College Teaching Associate in Music at St John's College. He studied composition and classical guitar at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. He took composition masterclasses with James MacMillan, Judith Weir and Howard Skempton, and classical guitar masterclasses with Stephano Grondona. He was awarded the Special Prize for Outstanding Achievement on graduation. He studied music semiotics and the history of music theory at the Edinburgh University with Raymond Monelle. At Wolfson College Cambridge, his doctoral research, supervised by Ian Cross and Alexander Goehr, concerned the Marxist and Kantian aspects of T.W. Adorno’s philosophy of aesthetic production. He also took the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge. He was Research Associate at the Electroacoustic Studios at the University of East Anglia, where he set up the online resource the Sonic Arts Research Archive. Duties included web design, server side programming, PHP/MySQL configuration, database and server management and the digital archiving of some rare recordings of Tim Souster’s early electronic improvisations.

He has been Lecturer in Music at the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow since 2002, teaching the philosophy of music, Opera, 19th Century German Lied, and modernist aesthetics.

In terms of research he has worked for the most part with Continental philosophy – especially the Frankfurt School, Sartre and Heidegger - but is increasingly interested in the intersections between the Continental and Analytical traditions. He is currently working on the post-Wittgensteinian language-game theories of Wilfrid Sellars and Jean-François Lyotard, and their application in the analysis of artistic practices. He is the PI for the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with the British Library on the Music of Thea Musgrave which is drawing on the archival holdings at the BL to build up a multidimensional picture of Musgrave’s compositional practice.

He has been external examiner at the Royal Northern College of Music; the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland; and the University of East Anglia.

Publications

Parker Dixon, Martin (2017): Forthcoming: “The Learning Community, a Quodlibet” Music Higher Education for the Twenty-first Century. B. Heile, E. Rodriguez, J. Stanley (eds).

Parker Dixon, Martin (2015): “The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics”, Humanities, 4, 506–522.

Parker Dixon, Martin (2015): “Creativity and Possessive Interests” in Concepts of Music and Copyright.  A. Rahmatian (Ed): Edward Elgar Publishing, 50-77.

Parker Dixon, Martin (2014): “Writing as Life Performed” in Adorno and Performance. W. Daddario, K. Gritzner (Eds): Palgrave MacMillian, 205-222.

Parker Dixon, Martin (2013): “Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New”, Scottish Music Review, Vol 3. http://www.scottishmusicreview.org/index.php/SMR/article/viewFile/41/35

Parker Dixon, Martin (2011): “Dwelling and the Sacralisation of the Air: A Note on Acousmatic Music” Organised Sound, vol 16, no.2, 115-119.

Parker Dixon, Martin (2009): “Labour, Work and Action in the Creative Process” in The Discipline of Creativity: Exploring the Paradox. B. Porter (Ed.): Cambridge: CUP, 47-59.

Dixon, Martin (2008): “Diary: Glasgow, Scotland, Monday, 17th July 2006” in Collision: Interarts Practices and Research, D. Cecchetto, N. Cuthbert, J. Lassonde and D. Robinson (Eds.): Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 201-208.

Dixon, Martin (2007): “The Horror of Disconnection:  The Auratic in Technological Malfunction” Transformations, 15 http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_15/article_06.shtml

Dixon, Martin (2006): “Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing” in Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402          .

Dixon, Martin (2006): “Echo's Body: Play and Representation in Interactive Music Software” Contemporary Music Review, vol. 25, number 1/2, 17-26.

Dixon, Martin (2002): “Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology.” Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93 http://www.8ung.at/fzmw/2002/2002_7.pdf