Scholarship

Current Scholarship

Vickers specializes in twentieth century British music history, primarily that of Benjamin Britten. He is in the midst of writing a long-term institutional history of the English Opera Group (1946-1980), for which he is a frequent reader at the Britten-Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, UK. Vickers also conducts archival research at the British Library, London; and the archives of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, London; in addition to the BBC Written Archives.

His 2011 dissertation on Michael Tippett's compositional process and the genesis of the song cycle The Heart's Assurance received the 2014 Nicholas Temperley Prize for Excellence in a Dissertation.

Vickers was Director of the international conference Benjamin Britten at 100: An American Centenary Symposium (24-27 October 2013) on the campus of Illinois State University, where he is Assistant Professor of Voice. Vickers received a 2012 Britten Award from The Trustees of The Britten Estate on behalf of the Symposium.
 

Ongoing Book Projects

• Benjamin Britten: His Second Century, Dr. Justin Vickers and Dr. Vicki Pierce Stroeher, Editors; a multi-author collection of essays by the world’s preeminent and emerging voices in Britten scholarship 
• [2013-Ongoing]
• Identity and British Musical Distinction (1880-1951), Dr. Justin Vickers and Dr. Jennifer Oates, Editors; a multi-author collection of essays that grapples with issues of the fractured national musical identities throughout the British Isles 
• [2014-Ongoing]
• Benjamin Britten and Song: Genesis, Compositional Process, and Critical Reception, Dr. Justin Vickers, co-authored with Dr. Vicki Pierce Stroeher; the first scholarly monograph devoted to Britten’s expansive song literature compositions 
• [2013-Ongoing]

Conference Presentations & Invited Lectures

• “Beginners Like Ourselves”: Benjamin Britten, Eric Crozier, John Piper and the Independence of an English Opera Group (1946-1948)
  • Invited Scholar at Benjamin Britten Centennial Celebration: In Words and Music (April 11, 2014) on The Rey M. Longyear Lecture Series, University of Kentucky, Lexington
   
  
• “Who cares if there is English opera?”: Britten’s Tradition of Native Opera and the Founding of the E.O.G.
  • Presented at Benjamin Britten at 100: An American Centenary Symposium (24-27 October 2013), Illinois State University, Normal
  • Invited Scholar at Britten’s Birthday Weekend (22-23 November 2013), Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, Ohio 
   
• “The Voice of America’s Musical Vitality”: Benjamin Britten in Illinois, January 1940
  • Commissioned by Sonorities, the magazine of the University of Illinois School of Music for their online publication (Fall 2013) and in print (Winter 2014) 
   
• A Centenary Retrospective of Britten’s Operas: “Those Voices That Will Not Be Drowned”
  • Commissioned by General and Artistic Director Michael Egal to write Program Notes on the operas of Benjamin Britten for Des Moines Metro Opera’s 2013 Festival Season 
   
• Britten’s Tradition of Native Opera and the Founding of the English Opera Group
  • Presented at Benjamin Britten on Stage and Screen (5-7 July 2013), University of Nottingham, England 
   
• Britten, Rainier, and Donne: A Silent “Epilogue” Finds its Voice
  • Lecture-Recital presented at Drake University (1 March 2013), Des Moines, Iowa
  • Lecture-Recital presented at the 2012 Conference of the North American British Music Studies Association, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (The Lecture Recital includes complete performances of Benjamin Britten’s The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Priaulx Rainier’s Cycle for Declamation, featuring the world première of Britten’s unpublished “Epilogue” to The Holy Sonnets.)
   
  
• In Britten's Shadow: Arthur Bliss and the 1962 Coventry Cathedral Festival Fifty Years On
  • Presented at the 2012 Spring meeting of the American Musicological Society of Greater New York (AMS-GNY) held jointly with the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA), Hunter College
   
• Retracing Michael Tippett’s Journey through the Creative Process of The Heart’s Assurance
  • Presented at the 2011 Analyser les Processus de Création Musicale Conference at the Université Lille Nord de France
   
• Guarded Aldeburgh: Capturing Benjamin Britten in Tony Palmer’s A Time There Was (1979)
  • Presented at the 2011 Music and the Moving Image VI Conference at NYU Steinhardt, New York University
   
• “Love Under the Shadow of Death”: Grief, Pacifism and the Composition of Michael Tippett’s The Heart’s Assurance
  • Presented at the 2010 Biennial Conference of the North American British Music Studies Association, Drake University

Dissertation

• “The Ineffable Moments Will Be Harder Won”: The Genesis, Creative Process, and Early Performance History of Michael Tippett’s The Heart’s Assurance [Doctor of Musical Arts in Performance and Literature – Dissertation, 2011; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] 
• *Recipient of the 2014 Nicholas Temperley Prize for Excellence in a Dissertation