Hilary holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Toronto. Hilary’s research explores the interplay of music, culture, and faith in mid-twentieth-century England, with a focus on the sacred music of Benjamin Britten.
Hilary’s doctoral dissertation interrogates Britten’s enduring interest in themes, tropes, and forms of the Anglo-Catholic tradition. In this research she emphasizes Britten’s engagement with occasional and site-specific sacred music, his enthusiasm for high-quality amateur music-making, and his complex engagement with politics, culture, and faith commitments which run counter to established narratives of the Modernist discourses into which his musical legacy has nevertheless recently been drawn.
Hilary is committed to combining scholarly research with practice, and her research continually informs her approach to church music.
For more information, see Hilary’s Humanities Commons profile.
Selected publications
“‘Vital Aspects of the Complete Composer:’ Elizabeth Maconchy’s Commissioned Works 1960–82,” in Elizabeth Maconchy in Context, edited by Justin Vickers and Lucy Walker (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026).
“Christian Music Beyond the Church: Ecumenical, Worshipping, and Academic Communities,” co-authored with Adam A. Perez, in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Christian Theology, Vol. 4, edited by Steve Guthrie and Bennett Zon (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026).
“‘Whoever Saw a Woman with a Neck That Thick’: Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, Walter Hussey, and Patronage of Modernist Art in Wartime.” The Musical Quarterly 105, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 2022).
“Let Justice Flow Down like a River: Singing the Sovereignty of Creation,” Reformed Worship 119 (March 2016): 17–27.
“Toward a Musical Praxis of Justice: A Survey of Global and Indigenous Canadian Song in the Hymnals of the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United Churches of Canada through their History,” The Hymn 63, no. 2 (Spring/ Summer 2012), 20–28.
“An Analysis of Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb,” Choral Journal 51, no. 10 (May 2011): 6–24.
Selected conference papers
“Edward Sackville-West’s Public-Private Duality and English Modernism’s Queer(ed) Spaces,” Tenth Biennial Conference, North American British Music Studies Association, 2024
“Britten’s Unfinished Christmas Sequence and the Modernist Uses of Congregational Song,” American Musicological Society (virtual), 2020
“Modernism as Parable: Britten’s Settings of Auden’s For the Time Being,” Eighth Biennial Conference, North American British Music Studies Association (virtual), 2020
“Modernist Church Music in Wartime: Walter Hussey’s Patronage of Benjamin Britten,” American Musicological Society, San Antonio. 2018
“‘Our opera is settled for Broadway:’ Britten and Auden’s Paul Bunyan and the Middlebrow,” Music and the Middlebrow, University of Notre Dame London Global Gateway, 2017
“‘Music by Enemy Composers’: Exploring the Politics of Mahler Reception in Early 20th-Century England,” Eighteenth Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, University of Toronto, 2014