Chair Professor
Mr & Mrs Hung Hing-ying Professor in the Arts
Daniel KL CHUA earned his PhD in musicology from Cambridge University and is currently the Chair Professor of music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU, he was the Director of Studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He was a Visiting Senior Research fellow at Yale (2014-15), a Henry Fellow at Harvard (1992-3), and a Research Fellow at Cambridge (1993-7). He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, a Fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He served as the President of the International Musicological Society 2017-2022. He was editor of Music & Letters, and is the founding editor of IMS Musicological Brainfood, and the founding co-editor of the California University Press series on global musicology.
He has written widely on music – from cosmological concepts in ancient Chinese music theory to NASA’s Golden Record on the Voyager mission – but is particularly known for his work on Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, philosophy, technology and theology. His is the author of five books: The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom, (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), and Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale, 2024). His articles include: ‘Rioting With Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring’ (2007), ‘Beethoven’s Other Humanism’ (2009), ‘Listening to the Self: The Shawshank Redemption and the Technology of Music’ (2011), and ‘Global Musicology: A Keynote Without A Key’ (2022). He is currently working on two projects: Rethinking Beethoven and the Enlightenment and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Beethoven's Late Quartets.
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2021Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth. Joint monograph with Alex Rehding. ZoneBooks (Princeton University Press).
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2021Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom. Edited by Jeremy Begbie, Daniel KL Chua and Markus Rathey. Oxford University Press.
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1995The "Galitzin" Quartets of Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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2021‘“Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all”: The Context and Expression of Essentially not Expressing Anything’ in Stravinsky in Context, ed. Graham Griffiths. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
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2021‘Revolutionary Freedom: An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven’ in Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom, eds. Jeremy Begbie, Daniel KL Chua and Markus Rathey, Oxford University Press, 2021.
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2020‘貝多芬的空白美學.’ Translated by Sun Yue. Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music No. 4 volume 161,(2020): 89-106. ISSN 1001-9871. DOI: 10.16504/j.cnki.cn11-1183/j.2020.04.008
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2020‘Global Musicology.’ Translated by Xu, Lu fan. Art of Music: Journal of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music 160, no. 1(2020): 142-50. 蔡寬量:“全球音樂學”,徐璐凡翻譯,音樂藝術: 上海音樂學院學報,第160期,2020年第1期,頁142-150。ISSN 1000-4270 CN31-1004/J
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2017‘Global Music History: A Positionless Paper’ in New Sound International Journal of Music, Issue 50 vol. 2 (2017), 12-16.
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2015Book review of Mark Evan Bonds’ Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, in Music Theory Online, volume 21/2.
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2005Book review of David Yearsley’s Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint, in Music Theory Spectrum, volume 27/1, pp.113-117.
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2001Book review of Susan McClary’s Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, volume 54/2, pp. 413-417.
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1999Book review of Beethoven Forum 5-6, in Music and Letters, volume 80/2, pp. 290-292.
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1997Book review of Fidelio: Cambridge Opera Handbook, ed. Paul Robinson, in Music and Letters, volume 78/3, pp. 432-433.
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20242022Elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy2019Conferred Chair Professor
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2018Elected Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society
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2017Conferred the Mr & Mrs Hung Hing-ying Professorship in the Arts2017Elected as President, International Musicological Society, for a term of five years2004Awarded Dent Medal, UK