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Musicologist
What makes a composition unique?
What makes a composition unique is at the heart of my work as a musicologist. I analyse, through close engagement with the notes, the decisions a composer has made and ask how they shape the work's identity, expressive character and effect on performers and listeners. Analysis does more than describe musical events: it seeks to understand how they function, how they cohere and where their particular force lies.
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At the same time, my work as a theorist is concerned with what connects different compositions. Placing works alongside one another—sometimes across a substantial corpus—can reveal recurrent procedures, shared formal or tonal strategies, and significant departures from an established pattern. My study of Beethoven's piano music, for example, traces the treatment of boundaries, space and register across many works: the larger pattern brings individual compositional decisions into sharper focus, while the exceptional case may in turn modify our understanding of the pattern. Comparative analysis therefore complements the uniqueness of each composition.
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Musical meaning and function are also shaped by historical circumstances, cultural identity, political pressures, patterns of reception and the traditions within which a work is created and heard. I therefore move between the internal structures of a composition and its wider social and historical impact. These perspectives come together in my research on Beethoven, Wagner, Jewish music, émigré composers in Britain, and the varied musical worlds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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Across these fields, I am concerned with relationships: between individual details and large-scale form, between music and words, between composers and the cultures through which they moved, and between scholarly interpretation and the experience of performers and listeners.
Beethoven: register, space and form
My book Boundaries, Space and Register in Beethoven's Piano Music (Boydell & Brewer, 2025) develops a new approach to Beethoven's use of the keyboard's expanding compass. It asks how register and musical space can shape form: how extreme high and low notes create boundaries, how those boundaries are crossed or withheld, and how the changing distance between musical lines contributes to a work's expressive and structural direction.
The book introduces analytical tools developed to make these processes visible, including Pitch Space Maps and registral graphs. My subsequent work has extended this approach through the idea of “span modulation,” which follows the changing vertical distance between the pianist's hands and relates the performer's physical experience at the keyboard to larger questions of form. A recent study of Beethoven's Fantasie, Op. 77, shows how a work that sounds spontaneous and improvisatory can conceal a compelling organisation of register and space. I have presented this research in conference papers, seminars and lecture-recitals, testing analysis against the immediacy of live sound.
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Beethoven has also been a collaborative and editorial field for me. I co-edited Beethoven the European (Brepols, 2023) and contributed to the volume, which places the composer within the international and intellectual networks of his time. Across these projects, I aim to bring technical analysis into dialogue with historical knowledge without allowing either to become an end in itself.
Wagner: from song to music drama
My research on Wagner began with my PhD at King's College London, completed under Arnold Whittall, on the Wesendonck-Lieder. I have continued to investigate Wagner's songs, a relatively neglected part of his output, and their connections with his operas and music dramas. The contrast is revealing: Wagner is associated above all with monumental theatrical works, yet the concentrated world of song repeatedly served him as a field of experiment. In songs, he could explore relationships among poetry, melody, harmony and dramatic utterance on an intimate scale before carrying related ideas into the theatre.
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My articles in The Wagner Journal have examined individual songs, questions of orchestration and the ways later musicians reimagined this repertoire. They include studies of early songs and their orchestrations by Felix Mottl and Hans Werner Henze. I am now developing this body of research into a book on Wagner's songs and the Wesendonck-Lieder, arguing for song as an important compositional crucible for the music dramas rather than a peripheral genre in his output.
Jewish music, Israel and exile
A further major strand of my work concerns Jewish music and the movement of musicians, ideas and styles across national and cultural boundaries.
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I was contributing co-editor of Music and Exile: From 1933 to the Present Day (Brill, 2023), a project centred on displacement, memory and creative survival. My continuing research examines the experiences and legacies of Jewish émigré composers in Britain and the traces of exile and the Holocaust in their music. I intend this work to lead to a book entitled Sonic Testimonies that in addition places individual works and careers within the cultural networks through which refugee musicians contributed to British musical life and beyond.
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As contributing editor of Classical and Popular Music in Israel: Transcultural Contrasts and Dialogues (University of Rochester Press, 2025), I helped bring together studies of Israeli music across genres and generations. The volume explores classical and popular traditions, the influence of the East, regional and international cultural interactions and influences, issues of gender and the creative potential of defining musical identity in a transcultural society.
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Allied to this I am guest editor of the issue of Yuval, journal of the Jewish Music Research Centre, devoted to the centenary of Joel Engel (1868-1927), leader of the Moscow branch of the St Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, a musicologist, composer and publisher. I also continue to performa and research the music of Engel's Russian-born British contemporary Samuel Alman (1877-1947), choir master and composer. Another long-standing subject is the shofar: its ritual history, symbolism and transformation into a concert instrument. My published study of the shofar in twentieth- and twenty-first-century composition grows directly from my own experience of performing and composing for it.
Scholarship, editing and research communities
Alongside books and articles, I have contributed reference entries on nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers to major music encyclopedias, such as Grove and MGG, and I have presented research in Britain and internationally. I was formerly an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Musical Research at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
For many years I have been an Honorary Associate in Music in the Open University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, participating in the research life and profile of its Music department.
Selected highlights
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Boundaries, Space and Register in Beethoven's Piano Music (Boydell & Brewer, 2025)
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Classical and Popular Music in Israel: Transcultural Contrasts and Dialogues (University of Rochester Press, 2025), contributing editor
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Music and Exile: From 1933 to the Present Day (Brill, 2023), contributing co-editor
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Beethoven the European (Brepols, 2023), co-editor and contributor
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Articles on Wagner's songs and their orchestrations in The Wagner Journal
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“Ancient Symbols, Modern Meanings: The Use of the Shofar in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music”
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“Span Modulation: Registral Space and Formal Design in Beethoven's Piano Music,” Dublin Music Analysis Conference, 2026
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Guest editor of a centenary journal issue devoted to Joel Engel