Dr Rajan Lal
Contact
About
I am a Title A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. I research and teach in the theory and analysis of most music ranging from the Classical Style to contemporary film. Of particular interest are the many and varied harmonic languages spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially among so-called 'transitional' composers (Scriabin, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, Berg, Webern, Alma Mahler, etc.); I often address these issues through the lens of set-theoretic and pitch-collectional theories, blending light mathematics with musicological argumentation. I completed all my degrees at Gonville & Caius College, in Cambridge, from 2017–2024.
Currently, I am writing Modernism's Mental Furniture: Scriabin-Schoenberg-Stravinsky 1907–1915 for a leading University Press; this interconnected account of modernist composition and related conceptual thought centres, predictably, on Scriabin, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky's lives and music; it is couched in what I regard the anni mirabiles 1907–1915, the age of the (most intensive) 'emancipation of dissonance'.
I was co-convenor for the Cambridge Faculty of Music Colloquium Series, 2023–24. From 2020–2024, I was head of Oxbridge Admissions at Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School, Rochester. I am an elected charitable trustee of the Society for Music Analysis, and am presently co-convenor of the SMA Colloquium Series, alongside James Donaldson (Indiana). My research has featured at national and international musicology conferences and I will host, through Trinity College, the annual SMA TAGS conference in late-March 2026.
Teaching and supervision
I have taught Music Analysis at Part IA, Part IB, and Part II for numerous Cambridge colleges, principally: Gonville & Caius, Trinity, and Clare. I have supervised about 40 Part II analysis portfolios to completion since 2020. I have also taught both music history, tonal skills, extended essay, and dissertations papers widely in Cambridge, to all year groups.
Projects supervised across the breadth of the Tripos include: performance analysis of J.S. Bach, structural depth in Sondheim's 'Sweeney Todd', 'octatonic serialism' in Dallapiccola, voice-leading reduction for Jazz, Stravinsky's transition to serialism, a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century-based topics on structure and form, leitmotivic appraisals of both early and contemporary film music, D'Indy and French political upheaval, corpus study and close reading in dialogue – and more. I presently lecture in Analysis at Part IB alongside Paul Wingfield.