Joseph is the Weston Junior Research Fellow in Music at New College. After completing his DPhil in Music at Lincoln College, Oxford in 2018, Joseph held a stipendiary lectureship for two years at New College. From 2019 to 2021 he was an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin. Outside of work, Joseph enjoys singing and playing the organ and harpsichord.

Teaching

Joseph teaches a range of historical topics before 1600 for the Prelims and FHS courses. He also teaches pre-tonal and tonal analysis, musical thought and scholarship, keyboard skills, and techniques of composition. Joseph holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from the University of Oxford.

Research Interests

Joseph's research centres on the music and culture of thirteenth-century France. He is especially interested in questions of musical meaning, and his work combines music analysis with historical work, critical theory, and manuscript studies. He is currently preparing a monograph on the intersections of music and violence during the period. Secondary interests include manuscript studies and the history of the book, digital humanities, and political music in the early twentieth century.

Selected Publications

Mason, Joseph W., ‘Trouver et partir: The meaning of structure in trouvère song’, Early Music History 40 (2022), 207–251.
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Debatable Chivalry: A jeu-parti by the Duke of Brittany and its context’, Medium Ævum 87, no. 2 (2018), 255–276.
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Structure and Process in the Old French jeu-parti’, Music Analysis 38, nos. 1–2 (2019), 47–79.
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Newly discovered 14th-century polyphony in Oxford’, Early Music 49/2 (2021), 245–59.
Leach, Elizabeth Eva, Joseph W. Mason, and Matthew P. Thomson (eds), A Medieval Songbook: Trouvère MS C (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2022).
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Oral and written transmission in the early jeu-parti’, Music & Letters (forthcoming 2022).
Quinlan, Meghan P., and Joseph W. Mason, ‘Popular Culture’ in The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Music in the Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Eva Leach and Helen Deeming, The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Music vol. 2 (forthcoming 2022).