Dr Peter Asimov

My interdisciplinary research reimagines the history of French musical modernism from the fin-de-siècle through the post-World War Two avant-garde, combining approaches from intellectual history, archival study, musical performance studies, and music analysis.

My doctoral research traced the profound impact of nineteenth-century theories of language and 'race'—in particular, the Indo-European hypothesis (or 'Aryan myth')—on French musicology and composition over the century from 1850 to 1950. Though largely obsolete today, I demonstrated how this widespread philological theory inspired musicologists’ efforts to compare Indian, Greek, and French music in search of imminent 'Indo-European' structures, in an era preoccupied with constructions of national and racial 'purity'. These theories, in turn, fuelled a generation of French composers’ appropriations of Indian and Greek sources as musical 'patrimony', with repercussions from the fin-de-siècle opera house to post–World War II serialism. My thesis, titled 'Comparative Philology, French Music, and the Composition of Indo-Europeanism from Fétis to Messiaen', won the International Musicological Society's Outstanding Dissertation Award.

My current, Leverhulme-funded research reconfigures the dramatis personae of French postwar modernism, focusing on the ‘vanishing performers’ long sidelined from the dogmatic and patriarchal discourses of the era yet integral to its history. I highlight Yvonne Loriod (1924–2010), the pioneering pianist whose career forms the basis for publications on gender and professionalisation, memorization and music analysis, and technological mediation. I have also spearheaded the recovery of Loriod's hitherto unknown and unpublished compositional œuvre, starting with her song cycle, Grains de cendre (1946), which received premiere performances in Paris and Cambridge in 2023.

My next project offers a distinctly musicological account of rhythm’s interdisciplinary intellectual history over the twentieth century, thus intervening in the emergent field of ‘critical rhythm’ studies. Retracing multilateral dialogues between music(ology) and the broader academic landscape in in Europe, North America, and the Black Atlantic, it recovers how musical sound and knowledge, via notions of ‘rhythm’, became a powerful force in fields ranging from experimental psychology and ergonomics to poetics and art criticism, with reverberations in musical practice.

I received my PhD from Clare College, Cambridge with the support of a Gates scholarship, and hold previous degrees in music from the University of Oxford, and in comparative literature (French and Sanskrit) from Brown University. Prior to returning to Cambridge, I was a Fondation Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellow for a year at the Laboratoire de Musicologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles. I am also an accomplished pianist and chamber musician, having performed at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Louvre, the Seoul Arts Center, and across Cambridge.