Dr Rajan Lal

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 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 the anni mirabiles 1907–1915, the age of the so-called '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, with James Donaldson (Indiana). My research has featured at national and international musicology conferences; through Trinity College, I hosted the annual SMA TAGS conference in late-March 2026.