Callum Blackmore is a graduate student in historical musicology studying French opera in the long eighteenth century. His dissertation, provisionally titled “Opera at the Dawn of Capitalism: Staging Fiscal Crisis in France and Its Colonies from Rameau to Cherubini”, explores representations of economic life on the operatic stage in the lead-up to the French and Haitian Revolutions. He argues that French opera companies, faced with the slow collapse of French mercantilism, began to reflect new conceptions of labor, property, wealth, commodity, and exchange, presaging the liberal economic reforms of the French Revolution. He has recently presented conference papers on the aesthetics of French Revolutionary string quartets and on operas composed by women during the reign of Louis XVI.
Originally hailing from New Zealand, Callum received his undergraduate degree from the University of Auckland, where his honours dissertation received the Drake Medal for musicology. Before moving to New York, he was awarded the Pettman DARE Fellowship, undertaking research in the North of England in association with Opera North and the University of Leeds. His work has been published in Current Musicology and Naxos Musicology International and has been presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. He is currently serving as the editor-in-chief of Current Musicology for the year 2020-2021. In his spare time, Callum is an opera critic for Parterre Box.
