‘My research interests are centred on the music of Mozart, 18th-century music theory, and Schenkerian analysis. Following a doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford on recapitulatory strategies in the first movements of Mozart’s Viennese piano concertos (1991), I have become particularly interested in the ways that the theoretical stance and working methods of Mozart and his greatest contemporaries can shape analytical and interpretative strategies. This has led to various types of research project, ranging from the close critical reading of individual works, through new performing editions that complete some of Mozart’s more elaborate fragments (including the Requiem and the Concerto fragment K.315f), to studies of the implications for performance of unusual interactions between notation and ‘narrative’ patterns (for example, in elements of self-absorption in Mozart’s concertos, generic tensions between fantasy and sonata in some early Beethoven sonatas, and deconstructive tendencies in Haydn’s late instrumental music). Subsidiary interests include instrumental music in Paris during the early years of the Third Republic (which has led to publications on the French symphonic poem and on the construction of modernity in late-19th-century French chamber music).

‘My current project is a book on reciprocity in Mozart’s instrumental music. Why should matters like give-and-take, generosity and co-operation for the common good or towards some common goals be worth thinking about in sonatas, quartets, concertos and symphonies? It has been customary, for the last 60 years or so, to contemplate the play of ideas in Mozart’s music primarily in abstract terms; but the insights gained from this approach should perhaps be weighed against the insights lost by marginalising the performative aspect of the music. What is to be gained by analysing Mozart’s music in terms of dialogics instead of dialectics? What demands does Mozart’s music make of performers’ musical awareness, tact, and sense of decorum? How do the fuzzy motivic logic, gestural flexibility and stylistic heterogeneity of his music potentially take on new meaning when taken out of the abstract and put back into the concrete situations of performance?

‘These are simple questions, but they are not simple to answer. I am trying to chip away at them from various angles: by considering – among other topics – the ’doubleness’ of Mozart’s accompanied sonatas; Mozart’s uses of silence in his instrumental music; how novel expressive meaning is generated through solo/orchestral interaction in concertos; how Mozart responds to the danger of cliché and expressive redundancy in his repeated use of common gestures (such as cadential trills); and how some commonly un-notated (that is, improvised) aspects of Mozart’s practice are exceptionally woven into the notation of some works. There won’t be any easy answers at the end, but I hope the ride will be fun.

‘I have supervised many doctoral and masters students over the last twenty years, in projects ranging from analytical and critical approaches to sources and style in Beethoven’s late Bagatelles, to the String Quartets of Hyacinthe Jadin, to a prima facie investigation of the musical style of Robert Parsons.’