Autobiography
I’m a musician based in Cambridge, UK. I'm an Affiliated Lecturer in Analysis at the Faculty of Music at the University here, and I also supervise a variety of courses; on Saturdays I teach in London at the Royal Academy of Music, junior department.
My research essentially concerns musical meaning—how is it possible that music can move us? I focus on conceptions of order: their codification, and relation to their cultural, notational, and embodied histories. I'm interested especially in the music of the French Baroque, as well as the writings of Luciano Berio.
My PhD (University of Cambridge) was Out of Order, an examination of the expressive operations of disorder. I present disorder as a simultaneously creative and destructive agent, and argue that the perception of a work's expression is the sense of its disorder.
My compositions reassess various social dynamics of performance, staging dialogues between old traditions and new, invented traditions. I compose for all ensembles, and have been recorded by such ensembles as the CBSO (YouTube link). I am particularly interested in applying my research within composition, as well as creating larger, often interdisciplinary structures within which to present this work. I strongly advocate live performance.
Alongside Rachel Stroud and Zephyr Brüggen in 2016 I founded rites, a musical and theatrical collective that questions and challenges rituals and conventions of the concert hall. A recent project, 3 Dreams, a weaving together of recitations of Dante with lecture and music, based on work I produced during my PhD, has toured the Italy and the UK numerous times.
I perform regularly on both modern and baroque violins, in 2022 signing on with the Cambridge String Quartet, elected in residence with Hughes Hall, Cambridge in 2024.
Outside of music, I research seventeenth and eighteenth-century depictions of the street, particularly traditions of street cries in Paris and London; I also write about the work of William Hogarth (especially his graphic works), and I work with analogue photography (see here for scans).
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University of Cambridge profile