Annika Forkert

Dr Annika Forkert is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Deputy Head of Undergraduate Programmes at the RNCM with research interests in the aesthetics, history, and analysis of: British music since 1900, microtonal music, serial music and modernism, and female composers. In 2023, her monograph Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music was published by Cambridge University Press; earlier that year, her chapter on Vaughan Williams’s film music appeared in D. Grimley and B. Adams’s Vaughan Williams and his World (Chicago University Press). Her next book, co-authored with Kenneth Smith (University of Liverpool), will be about Franz Schreker’s operas.

Annika holds a PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Magister Artium from Humboldt-Universität Berlin in Musicology and Philosophy. She also studied at Heidelberg University and Halle/Wittenberg University (Piano Pedagogy).

After her PhD, she was awarded a post-doctoral Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Bristol for a three-year project on Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark. Before her appointment at the RNCM, Annika was a Lecturer in Musicology at Liverpool Hope University, teaching a range of music history, analysis, aesthetics at UG and PG level.

Annika has also worked as a regular author of programme notes for Bavarian Radio and other orchestras and ensembles, and as a translator, speaker, and consultant for European music festivals and orchestras.

• British music since 1900
• Microtonal music of the early twentieth century
• Serial music and modernism
• Female composers’ music

Annika's current research focuses on early- to mid-twentieth century British music, especially by Elisabeth Lutyens, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Rebecca Clarke. The Cambridge University Press monograph Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in Twentieth-Century British Music, was published in 2023, shortly after a book chapter on Vaughan Williams’s film scores.

Future research includes work on a second, co-authored monograph on Franz Schreker’s operas (early twentieth-century German music, with Kenneth Smith, University of Liverpool), which will explore the analytic, dramaturgic, and philosophical potential of these works, which are today seeing a revival in European opera houses.