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Catherine Laws
Professor and Chair of Postgraduate Research (Semester 1)

Biography

Catherine Laws is a musicologist and a pianist specialising in contemporary music. She studied Music at the University of York, and her doctoral thesis, Music and Language in the Work of Samuel Beckett was awarded in 1996. Towards the end of her doctoral studies she took up the position of Lecturer in Music at De Montfort University, Leicester, subsequently moving to Dartington College of Arts in 1997. She stayed at Dartington for 10 years, working as Associate Director of Music from 2000 and also leading the College’s interdisciplinary MA in Performance Practices. In 2007 Catherine left full-time academia to focus more on performance, taking a part-time Fellowship in Artistic Research at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. In 2010 she returned to the University of York as a lecturer, while also continuing as a Senior Artistic Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute. She was promoted to Professor of Music in 2020.

Catherine performs and records regularly, often working closely with composers on new pieces. Her 75-minute solo multimedia performance piece, Player Piano, developed in collaboration with four composers, two theatre makers, and a film maker, was premiered in 2016. She has recently developed a series of piano films with Korean film maker Minyung Im, reconceiving for film a number of piano pieces developed collaboratively with composers Juliana Hodkinson, Edward Jessen, Annea Lockwood, Roger Marsh, and Paul Whitty.

Catherine has published widely on aspects of contemporary performance practices, especially in relation to processes of collaboration, embodiment, and identity. Voices, Bodies Practices: Performing Musical Subjectivities, co-authored with William Brooks, David Gorton, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Stefan Östersjö, Jeremy J. Wells, came out in 2019 (with a linked repository of artistic work), and the edited volume Performance, Subjectivity, and Experimentation was published in 2020. Catherine also works in the field of word and music studies, with a special focus on the role of music in the work of Samuel Beckett and composers’ responses to his texts. Her book ‘Headaches Among the Overtones’: Music in Beckett/ Beckett in Music (Editions Rodopi, 2013) was the first monograph on the topic of Beckett and music.

Departmental roles

  • REF Lead; Department Research Committee
  • Performance Supervisors' Committee
  • Scholarships Committee

Dr Catherine Laws

Contact details

Dr Catherine Laws
School of Arts and Creative Technologies
University of York
York
YO10 5GB

Tel: +44 (0)1904 32 2453