Dr Steven Jan

Biography

Steven Jan studied music at the University of Leeds and went on to complete a PhD there, entitled 'Aspects of Mozart 's Music in G Minor: Toward the Identification of Common Structural and Compositional Characteristics’, under the supervision of Professor Julian Rushton. The dissertation was published by Garland in 1995 in their Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities series. Before joining the Music Department at Huddersfield in January 2001 he taught at the University of East Anglia and in the School of Academic Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. He is currently Senior Lecturer and Music Subject Area Leader.

Research & Scholarship

Steven Jan works on the application to music of theoretical and analytical perspectives drawn from evolutionary theory, particularly the 'meme ' paradigm first expounded in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976). His monograph The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) is the first full-scale formal exposition of the theory of musical memetics. A related research interest is the use of computer resources in evolutionary musicology, music theory and music analysis and he is currently planning an extended research project in this area with Dr Marcelo Gimenes and Dr Jonathan Wakefield. His other research interests include the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Research Outputs

Areas for Research Supervision

Steven Jan is happy to supervise research students (MA by Research, MPhil, PhD) on topics in the following areas of investigation:

• Music and memetics
• Music and evolutionary thought
• Music theory and analysis
• Computer-aided musicology, music theory and music analysis.
• Musicological research on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven

Current PhD students include:

• Andrew Hawkett: An Empirical Investigation into the Concept of Musical Memes in Western Classical Music using Data-Mining Techniques on MusicXML Documents.
• Ahmed al-Badr: The Musical Characteristics of the Folk Songs of Southern Iraq.

Steven’s recent supervisions include an MMus dissertation on the application of analytical methodologies to Haydn string quartet development sections.