Jane Pettegree
St Andrews / Staff (Music / English)
Jane Pettegree is currently Head of Curriculum (Music as part of your degree) at the Music Centre, University of St Andrews, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English. With the Music Centre, she co-ordinators first year music modules on musicology, words and music and ethnomusicology, and contributes to teaching in Scottish music. In collaborations with other teaching units (e.g. the Schools of English, Modern Languages, and Classics), she delivers interdisciplinary teaching on music and rhetoric, and music and drama. Her doctoral thesis was on early English drama (University of St Andrews, awarded 2009), resulting in a monograph that looked at the connections between metaphor and performance in representations of national identity (Foreign and Native on the English Stage, 1588-1611, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Subsequent published articles have looked at the applications of legal language and rhetoric in early modern English plays, and at the performance and reception of early operas in Britain. She also helped to set up the St Andrews, subsequently Byre, Opera company in the University of St Andrews, active from 2009, directing new productions of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (2009), Eccles/Congreve The Judgement of Paris (2011) and Handel, Acis and Galatea (2013). Her portfolio of work includes opera and other dramatic projects designed to assist with the public dissemination of research. These include directing an opera with a new, student-involved, English libretto translation (Gluck, Iphigenie in Tauride, 2015, with Byre Opera); designing and directing a programme of opera arias and scenes based on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (April 2016); musical directing and score arrangement for a reconstruction of an early Stuart masque (The Masque of the Olympic Knights, February 2017), public workshop design and delivery exploring environmental themes associated with opera (Xerxes in the Garden, June 2018); designing and directing a Byre Opera production that explored the connections between Isaac Newton’s ideas about colour/sound synaesthesia and modern scientific research about light, in a collaboration with the School of Astronomy at St Andrews (‘A torrent of light’: Newton’s Optics, synaesthesia and Eccles/Congreve’s The Judgement of Paris, October 2018); translating Latin comedy as ‘rap’ for performance by students exploring new research into music and Roman comedy (Plautus, Menaechmi, School of Classic/The Byre Theatre, St Andrews, April 2019).
Jane is currently looking for opportunities to be involved in designing (writing) and delivering (directing, producing) performance-based approaches aiming to explore and present interdisciplinary research to a wider public. Her own research suggest that performance environments can be used to develop abstract ideas into personifications and story-lines that act as powerful explicatory vehicles for new and emerging ideas and identities, communicating these more powerfully to than more conventional discursive methods.