Biography
I am a musicologist who works for the most part on music in the twentieth century. I completed a joint honours BA in Music and History at Trinity College Dublin before undertaking postgraduate study at Cambridge. My research interests encompass performance and cultural/social meaning, performance analysis, creativity and creative processes, and individual artistry—cutting across western classical and popular music traditions. Many of these themes come into play in my doctoral thesis which focuses on the recordings of Russian pianist Maria Yudina and her artistry. I am supervised by Prof. John Rink.
My conference papers (both in recent years and upcoming) cover Yudina, Glenn Gould, Joni Mitchell, Dmitri Shostakovich, U2, Johannes Brahms, Herbert von Karajan and others. Some of these form the basis of upcoming publications, and if you want to read more about any of them, you can do so on my Academia page.
In 2019, I co-organised a conference entitled ‘The Classical Musician in the 21st Century’ at the Faculty of Music in Cambridge (you can read a report on it here). In 2019-2020, I was a member of the Faculty of Music Research Colloquium Committee.
My studies at Cambridge are funded by a Peterhouse Graduate Studentship.
Publications
‘The Historiography of the Twentieth-Century Classical Performer: Life, Work, Artistry’, Twentieth-Century Music 18/2 (June 2021), 161-184.
‘Large-Scale Structure, Performance and Brahms’s Op. 119 No. 2’, Music Analysis 40/1 (March 2021), 104-130.
'The Pianist Who Killed Stalin: Remembering The Life of Maria Yudina, 50 Years After Her Death', VAN Magazine 189 (2020).
Teaching and Supervisions
In 2020-21, I supervise on the following courses:
• IA Music and Musicology Today
• IB Introduction to Performance Studies
