Jim Samson

Jim Samson (1946--) is an internationally known musicologist, professor, and music critic. He has published widely on the music of Chopin, Liszt, and Szymanowski and on analytical and aesthetic topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. He is one of three series editors of The Complete Chopin: A New Critical Edition (in progress, Peters). His writings on the music of east central Europe in general and the works of Szymanowski in particular form a valuable contribution to the historiography of this area in English. He has held positions as Professor of Music at the Universities of Exeter and Bristol and, since 2002, at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Merit from the Polish Ministry of culture for his contribution to Chopin scholarship, and in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He recently won the 2004 Royal Philharmonic Society Book Award for his Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt.

Authored books

• Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Early Atonality 1900-1920 (London and New York, 1977; ii, 1987; iii, Oxford, 1994), 242 pp.
• The Music of Szymanowski (London1980; New York, 1981), 220 pp.
• The Music of Chopin (London, New York and Melbourne, 1985; ii, Oxford, 1994), 243 pp.
• Frederic Chopin (Reclams Musikführer), tr. Meinhard Saremba (Stuttgart, 1991), 335 pp. (This is a revised and slightly expanded version of The Music of Chopin.)
• Chopin: The Four Ballades (Cambridge, 1992), 104 pp.
• Chopin (Master Musicians) (Oxford, 1996), 322 pp.
• Virtuosity and the Musical Work: the Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge, 2003), 240 pp.

Edited books

• Chopin Studies (Cambridge, 1988), 258 pp.
• The Late Romantic Era. Man & Music vol. 7 (London, 1991), 463 pp.
• The Cambridge Companion to Chopin (Cambridge, 1992), xi 341 pp.
• (with John Rink), Chopin Studies 2 (Cambridge, 1994), 253 pp.
• The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, 2002), 772 pp.
• (with Bennett Zon), Nineteenth-Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music (Aldershot, 2002), 373 pp.

In Preparation

• Series editor (with J. Rink and J.-J. Eigeldinger) and contributor, The Complete Chopin: A New Critical Edition (Peters edition). First volume (Ballades) in press.