Benedict is Professor of the Analysis and Philosophy of Music at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh.  He received his MA and PhD from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, subsequently holding fellowships at Heidelberg, Princeton and Berlin, and worked previously at Oxford as Lecturer in Music and Senior Research Fellow at New College.    

  Benedict’s research and teaching interests include musical temporality and subjectivity, theory and analysis (especially 19th-century form and late-Romantic harmonic practice), philosophy, and the history of music c. 1770–1945 (with particular focus on Mendelssohn and Hensel, besides German Romanticism, British music, and later nineteenth-century music).  He is the author of six monographs: the first, Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011, offers the first substantial account of the development of cyclic form in the nineteenth century.  The second, The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era, is an analytical and philosophical study of the relation between music and time from Beethoven and Schubert to Franck and Elgar, published by Oxford University Press in 2015.  Another ongoing project explores the harmonic usage of late 19th-century composers outside or on the periphery of the Austro-German tradition, extending recent work in neo-Riemannian theory and the geometries of tonality into wider cultural issues pertaining to nationalist discourses and historiography. Some of this work was published in late 2016 as an RMA Monograph, Towards a Harmonic Grammar of Grieg’s Late Piano Music: Nature and Nationalism.  Arthur Sullivan: A Musical Reappraisal, a pioneering study of the music of the ever-popular but long critically neglected English composer, appeared in 2017 in Routledge’s Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series.  The fifth, Music and Subjectivity, and Schumann, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022: it offers a long-overdue critical examination of the notion of musical subjectivity, seeking to provide a critical refinement of this concept and to elucidate both its importance and limits.  His most recent book is on Fanny Hensel's String Quartet for the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series.  He has edited several further books, including Rethinking Mendelssohn (Oxford, 2020), The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism (2021), and Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context (with Thomas Schmidt; Cambridge, forthcoming 2025), and was the co-editor of a special issue of 19th-Century Music on subjectivity and song (spring 2017).  In addition, he has published on a broad range of music from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in leading journals such as 19th-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Analysis, Journal of Music Theory, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Music.

  Benedict was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin in 2019–20, and has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations.  He is the recipient of the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association for the article ‘Cyclic Form, Time and Memory in Mendelssohn's A minor Quartet, Op. 13’, Musical Quarterly, 93/1 (2010), which explored the relationship between musical form, time and memory from an analytical and phenomenological perspective.  Forthcoming and future projects include a volume on Coleridge-Taylor's 'Hiawatha' trilogy for the 2025 anniversary (published in OUP's Keynotes series) and a large-scale collaborative study of instrumental form in the nineteenth century.  He is currently co-editor of Music & Letters, series editor for Cambridge University Press's Music in Context series, and serves on the editorial boards of Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, and Romance, Revolution & Reform. He is always happy to hear from scholars interested in publishing in Music in Context.