Research

With Dr Christine Dysers, this ongoing project asks what musical modernism means today and what —if anything — ideas such as metamodernism and altermodernism can bring to better understanding contemporary music.

In Twentieth-Century Music (first view 2024) — This article considers the relationship between neoliberalism and musical composition, through drawing on perspectives that build on Adorno and Foucault's work.

In The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music (Oxford University Press, 2022) — Focusing on New York City in 1983, this book chapter explores temporality in music and sound art, from that place and time.

In Transformations of Musical Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) — This book chapter explores memories and ruins of symphonic monuments and spaces.

In Twentieth-Century Music, 15/1 (2018) — A book review of Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 (California University Press, 2017).

The material world — and what we think of as ”material” in the first place — is changing. This book outlines how music responds to and shapes these crises of materiality.

This special issue of Contemporary Music Review brings together new work on contemporary music and materialist theory (edited with Isabella van Elferen and Matthew Sergeant).

In Contemporary Music Review, 39/5 (2020) — This jointly authored editors’ introduction charts key themes in recent materialist reflections on music.

in Music & Letters , 99/2 (2018) — This article revisits Adorno’s aesthetics in light of new materialist philosophies, to ask: how do composers work with “musical material”?

In International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 13/2 (2017) — Drawing on posthumanist theory, this article outlines compositional engineering of performers’ bodies and instruments.

In Contemporary Music Review, 32/5 (2013) — This article asks: How do composers refigure embodied, perceptual relationships between players and their instruments?

‘The Ontoriography of Music in the Twenty-First Century: Absence and Identification,’ in The Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium, (Edinburgh University Press, in press 2025) – This chapter considers the absences that connect music, philosophy, and self-identity in the 21st century.

In The Sound of Žižek: Musicological Perspectives on Slavoj Žižek (Peter Lang, 2023) — This book chapter takes up Žižek’s account of fetishism to complicate commonplace assumptions about objects and processes in music.

In Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 145/2 (2020) — This article argues that compositional attitudes to musical material express attitudes about those composing and listening.

Drawing together original contributions, this edited collection demonstrates psychoanalytic theory’s utility in interpreting and analysing music.

In Music—Psychoanalysis—Musicology (Routledge, 2018) — Examining a range of psychoanalytic writing, this book chapter unpacks who or what is psychoanalysed in psychoanalytic discourses on music.

In International 'Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 45/2 (2014) — This article explores a recent quartet to examine how the history of musical subjectivity is treated in contemporary music.

In Psychoanalysis and History, 26/2 (2024) — A book review of Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michael Levin’s Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023).