Autobiography
I’m a musician based in Cambridge, UK. I'm an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music at the University here, and I also supervise a variety of courses; I also teach in London at the Royal Academy of Music.
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I perform regularly as a violinist and direct a number of groups in Cambridge and London. I am particularly interested in non-standard performance dynamics, and applications of research. In 2022, I signed on with the Cambridge String Quartet, elected in residence with Hughes Hall, Cambridge in 2024.
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My research often returns to the same question: How does music move us? Increasingly, my approach to research is turning to interdisciplinary, and performance-led methods. I believe that practitioners have extraordinary knowledge to contribute which is essentially overlooked by our dominant epistemological frameworks.
I'm currently working on a monograph on the French Baroque (especially the music and writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau), and I'm also interested in the music and writings of Luciano Berio.
My PhD (University of Cambridge, 2024) 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.
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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.
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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.​
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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
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