Nicole Grimes is an Irish musicologist based in Southern California, where she is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. Her research is focused at the intersection between music, literature, and philosophy, with much of her writing concentrating on German music criticism, music analysis and music aesthetics from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. She is passionate about uncovering the music of women composers who have been lost to history, an enterprise that is central both to her teaching and her research.

She is currently at work on large-scale projects concerning the music of Emilie Mayer (1812–1883) and Clara Schumann (1819–1896). Her most recent book, Rethinking Brahms co-edited with Reuben Phillips, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2022. Her monograph, Brahms’s Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (Cambridge University Press) explores the reciprocal relationship between Brahms’s music—as it relates to loss—and the German intellectual tradition. This book was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Danijela Kulezic-Wilson Book Prize of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and it was one of nine Notable Music Books of 2019 by Alex Ross of the New Yorker. Her other books include Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism and Expression (co-edited with Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx, 2013), and Mendelssohn Perspectives (co-edited with Angela R. Mace, 2012).

She has published articles and book chapters on Beethoven, Brahms, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, Schoenberg, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wolfgang Rihm, Donnacha Dennehy, and on topics in music aesthetics in various peer-review journals and books. She has recently co-edited a special issue of Nineteenth Century Music Review called Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies with Joe Davies. Her Keynote Lecture for the Postgraduate Conference of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2021), “‘An die Hoffnung’: A Musical Footnote to Ali Smith’s Spring,” is published in Musicological Austriaca.
 
Nicole Grimes is the Series Editor of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks. Together with J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Grimes successfully relaunched that series late in 2020, with the first titles in the new series scheduled to appear in 2023. Grimes has served on Board of Directors of the American Brahms Society since 2016. From 2020–2023 she served as a Trustee of the Society for Music Analysis in the UK, having been a member of the Editorial Board of their journal Music Analysis since 2015. She is a member of the Team of Advisor of the Women in Global Music (WIGM Network), and she serves on the Advisory Board for Irish Musical Studies, and the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research. Before taking up her post at UCI, she held faculty positions at Royal Holloway, University of London, University College Dublin, and Keele University.

Grimes studied historical musicology at Trinity College Dublin, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, and Humboldt University, Berlin.

For further information, and for copies of her open access publications, please visit:

Faculty page: https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6634

I serve as the General Series Editor of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks. This series builds on the legacy of the acclaimed 1990s Cambridge Music Handbooks of providing accessible introductions to landmarks in music history written by leading experts in their field. The new series takes a broad, inclusive approach, encompassing classical and popular music, and featuring hitherto underrepresented creators and genres, embracing the music of women composers and Black composers, as well as works from the established canon. The relaunch of this series was envisaged and brought about by Nicole Grimes (General Editor of the series) and J. P. E. Harper-Scott. 

The first tranche of books is in print and will appear in late 2023. These titles will be available at Cambridge University Press:

Arnold Whittall, Schoenberg: ‘Night Music’ – Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung

John Michael Cooper, Margaret Bonds: The Montgomery Variations and Du Bois Credo

Julian Rushton, Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique

Benedict Taylor, Hensel: String Quartet in E flat

Julian Horton, Robert Schumann: Piano Concerto

Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies, Special issue of Nineteenth Century Music Review, edited by Joe Davies and Nicole Grimes (2023)

 “‘An die Hoffnung’: A Musical Footnote to Ali Smith’s Spring,” Musicological Austriaca: A Journal for Austrian Music Studies(September 2021) 

Lee Rothfarb and Christoph Landerer (trans.), Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch Schönen, commissioned for Musicologica Austriaca, 2019. Review article

 “Brahms’s Ascending Circle: Hölderlin, Schicksalslied, and the Process of Recollection,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 11/1 (July 2014): 1–36.

“Eduard Hanslick,” Oxford Bibliographies Online (Autumn 2014) 

“The Schoenberg/Brahms Critical Tradition Reconsidered,” Music Analysis 31/ii–iii (Autumn 2012): 127–75.

“Brahms’s Poetic Allusions through Hanslick’s Critical Lens,” American Brahms Society Newsletter 29/2 (Autumn 2011): 5–9.

 “A Critical Inferno? Hoplit, Hanslick, and Liszt’s Dante Symphony,” Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland 7 (2011–12): 3–22.

“‘Come Rise to Higher Spheres!” Tradition Transcended in Brahms’s Violin Sonata in G Major, Op. 78,” in Ad Parnassum: A Journal of Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music 6/11 (April 2009): 129–152 [with Dillon R. Parmer].

“In Search of Absolute Inwardness and Spiritual Subjectivity? The Historical and Ideological Context of Schumann’s ‘Neue Bahnen’,” International Review for the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 39/2 (December 2008): 139–163.

“Theory and Analysis,” in Clara and Robert Schumann in Context, ed. Joe Davies and Roe-Min Kok (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, in preparation)

“Manifestations of Death in the Music of Johannes Brahms,” in Music and Death, ed. Wolfgang Marx (Rochester NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2022, submitted).

“Giving Voice to Spectralism in the Music of Donnacha Dennehy,” in Oxford Handbook to Spectral and Post-Spectral Music, ed. Amy Bauer, Liam Cagney, and Will Mason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

“Introduction: Rethinking Brahms,” in Rethinking Brahms, ed. Nicole Grimes and Reuben Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, in press), co-authored with Reuben Phillips.

“Hearing Rihm hearing Brahms: Symphonie ‘Nähe fern’ and the Future of Nostalgia,” in Rethinking Brahms, ed. Nicole Grimes and Reuben Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, in press).

“Formal Innovation and Virtuosity in Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17,” Clara Schumann Studies, ed. Joe Davies(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 141–66.

“Musical Romanticism as a Historiographical Construct,” in The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism, ed. Benedict Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 327–42.

“‘Ueber Religionsverschiedenheiten’: The Role of Religious Difference in the Music Criticism of Eduard Hanslick,” in Eduard Hanslick im Kontext, ed. Alexander Wilfing and Christoph Landerer (Vienna: Holitzer Verlag, 2020), 193–204.

“Brahms as a Vanishing Point in the Music of Wolfgang Rihm: Reflections on Klavierstück Nr 6,” Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History, and Analysis Honour of Harry White, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley (Vienna: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2018), 512–547.

“Philosophy,” in Johannes Brahms in Context, ed. Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges, Music in Context Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 277–85. 

“The Sense of an Ending: Adorno, Brahms, and Music’s Return to the Land of Childhood,” Irish Musical Analysis (Irish Musical Studies, Vol. 11), ed. Gareth Cox and Julian Horton (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), 104–24.

“German Liberalism, Nationalism, and Humanism in Hanslick’s Writings on Brahms,” in Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx, eds, Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 160–84.

“Chronology” and “Introduction,” in Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx, eds, Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), xii–xiv, and 1–11 respectively

“‘Wordless Judaism, Like the Songs of Mendelssohn’? Hanslick, Mendelssohn and Cultural Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna,” in Nicole Grimes and Angela R. Mace, eds, Mendelssohn Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 49–62.

“Introduction” (with Angela R. Mace), in Nicole Grimes and Angela R. Mace, eds, Mendelssohn Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 1–6.

Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges (eds), Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Public and Private Performance; and Paul Berry, Brahms Among Friends: Listening, Performance, and the Rhetoric of Allusion, commissioned for Music & Letters (April 2016): 169–173.

Constantin Floros, Free but Alone: A Life for Poetic Music, commissioned for Nineteenth-Century Music Review 9/2 (December 2012): 341–46.

Theophil Antonicek, Gernot Gruber and Christoph Landerer, eds, Eduard Hanslick zum Gedenken: Bericht des Symposiums zum Anlass seines 100. Todestags, commissioned for the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland 7 (2011–2012): 67–76.

Walter Frisch and Kevin C. Karnes, eds, Brahms and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press) commissioned for Music Analysis 31/1 (Spring 2011): 140–150.

Kevin C. Karnes, Music Criticism and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna, commissioned for the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland 4 (2008–2009): 79–83.

Schoenberg, String Quartets, Aron Quartet with Anna Maria Pammer, sop., Preiser Records, PR 90572, commissioned for Nineteenth-Century Music Review 2/2 (2005): 220–22.