The trustees of the Society for Music Analysis manage the affairs of the charitable incorporated organisation (CIO), and for that purpose may exercise all the powers of the CIO. Trustees take on different roles within the Society, including responsibility for areas including outreach, communications and events. Profiles of the individual trustees are given below.

Genevieve Arkle

Genevieve is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Surrey and will be joining the University of Bristol as a Lecturer in Music in January 2022. Her research focuses on intertextuality in 19th- and 20th-Century music, specifically the works of Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. In January 2020 she was awarded the Wagner Society Young Lecturer’s Prize for her research on Wagner’s Parsifal, and she has had her work published in both British and European academic journals. She is Deputy Director of the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research, Leader of the Gustav Mahler Research Centre Postgraduate Forum, Team Lead for the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Music Studies Network, and an Affiliate of the Black Opera Research Network. Alongside her research and teaching she works as an EDI activist and is passionate about speaking out on issues of race and representation in Music Higher Education. 

Esther Cavett

Email: esther.cavett@kcl.ac.uk
Esther Cavett is Senior Research Fellow at King’s College, London, and Lecturer in music at Somerville, Jesus and Lincoln Colleges, Oxford.  She works at the intersection between academic music, performance, and music education, drawing upon her background and training in music, law, and psychology. Her current research interests are in the music of Howard Skempton, the application of qualitative research methods to music analysis and musicology and drawing discourse on music pedagogy into mainstream academic music debate. As trustee of the SMA, she was trustee ‘sponsor’ for the SMA Music Literacy Project.  She is co-ordinator of the King’s/St George’s Academy, which runs small group, after school music teaching for children living in Southwark, involving King’s students as teaching assistants. She set up and now assists in the running of Water City Music, a charity providing access to performance opportunities for musicians of all skills levels, working collaboratively.

Oliver Chandler

Email: oliver.chandler@keble.ox.ac.uk
Oliver Chandler is an academic professor at the Royal College of Music and senior college lecturer in music at Keble College, University of Oxford. He is also a musicianship and guitar teacher at the Royal College of Music Junior Department. His first monograph, A Twelve-Tone Repertory for Guitar: Julian Bream and the British Serialists, 1956-1983, was published in June 2023. With Professor Emeritus J. P. E. Harper-Scott, he is also the co-author of Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music (RMA Monograph Series, in press), which explores the limits of harmonic-functional analysis in the music of Richard Wagner. Also interested in a broad range of British music, he began his academic career with a Ph.D. on Edward Elgar’s late chamber music before going on to write about composers such as Humphrey Searle, Malcolm Arnold, and Stephen Dodgson. Much of this work has been published in academic journals, including Music & LettersMusic Theory Online, and Music Theory & Analysis. Committed to the survival of music analysis in British Higher Education, he is a trustee of the Society for Music Analysis. He also sits on the editorial board of Soundboard Scholar.

Sarah Moynihan

Email: sarah.moynihan@manchester.ac.uk
Sarah is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Manchester. She has previously held teaching positions in music theory and analysis at the University of Nottingham, Oxford Brookes University, Royal Holloway, and several colleges at the University of Oxford. Music theory and analysis is also central to her research, which places a critical focus on form in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her doctoral thesis examined the history of analytical approaches to Jean Sibelius’s music to reformulate the accepted view of the composer as an early modernist. Her prize-winning TAGS essay on Sibelius’s ‘Worker’s March’ – an application of the theoretical models developed in her thesis – was published in the April 2020 SMA Newsletter.

Sarah is keen to support and represent early-career and postgraduate music theorists and aims to promote the continuing growth of the community. She has a particular interest in contributing to writing groups, workshops, and training events as well as developing online learning material.

James Olsen 

Email: jgo21@cam.ac.uk

James is Affiliated Lecturer in music at the University of Cambridge and College Teaching Associate in music at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he was supervised by Professor Nicholas Cook. His research interests include the theory and analysis of music from the eighteenth century to the present, the application of philosophical hermeneutics to music, critical theory, and music education. He is also a composer, and his works have been performed by, amongst others, the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, the Philharmonia Orchestra and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Three commercial recordings of his music have been released. He has a strong interest in music education, and is the founder of Olsen Verlag, a social enterprise whose purpose is to bring Western art music to wider audiences.

Ian Pace

Email: ian@ianpace.com
Ian Pace is Senior Lecturer in Music and Head of Performance at City, University of London, having previously held positions at the University of Southampton and Dartington College of Arts. His areas of academic expertise include nineteenth-century performance practice, comparative performance studies, issues of music and society (with particular reference to the Frankfurt School), contemporary performance practice and issues, music and culture under fascism, modernist music and its institutions, in particular in Germany, critical musicology, and music historiography. He co-edited and was a major contributor to the volume Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy, published by Ashgate in 1998, and authored the monograph Michael Finnissy’s The History of Photography in Sound: A Study of Sources, Techniques and Interpretation, published by Divine Art in 2013. He has also published many articles in Music and Letters, Contemporary Music Review, TEMPOThe Musical Times, The Liszt Society Journal, International Piano, Musiktexte, Musik & Ästhetik, The Open Space Magazine, as well as contributing many book chapters to edited volumes. The collection Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy: Bright Futures, Dark Pasts, co-edited with Nigel McBride, will appear from Routledge in April 2019, volumes on Writing on Contemporary Musicians and Writing about Contemporary Artists in Theory and Practice, from Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan respectively, both co-edited with Christopher Wiley, will appear in early 2020, and Rethinking Contemporary Musicologies: The Limits of Interdisciplinarity and the Dangers of Deskilling, co-edited with Peter Tregear, will appear from Routledge in 2020. Other forthcoming publications include monographs on music in Weimar and post-war Germany, a book on Brahms Performance Practice for Routledge, and a history of specialist musical education in Britain.

Mark Richards

Email: Mark.Richards@qas.org.uk
Mark is Senior Deputy Head at Queen Anne’s School in Caversham, Berkshire – an independent boarding and day school for girls aged 11-18, and is responsible for the operational management of the school on a day to day basis. He also teaches A Level Music, where many of his pupils go onto university to read Music. He successfully completed an MMus in Theory and Analysis at King’s College, London, supervised by Arnold Whittall and Christopher Wintle; further research continued at Cardiff University. He has written several books and articles associated with A Level Music and organises conferences and symposiums for schools across the country: live and remote. He has extensive experience of examination work having been Deputy Chief Examiner for Music of the International Baccalaureate for a number of years. Analytical interests focus on Schenkerian theory, music of the Second Viennese School, contemporary American music and assessing the importance of musical literacy as pupils make the transition from school to university. He is also an experiencd school inspector.

Kenneth Smith

Email: kmsmith@liverpool.ac.uk

Kenneth is Professor of Music Theory at the University of Liverpool where he has worked since 2011, holding previous posts at Keele and Durham (where he completed his PhD in 2009). He lectures on various aspects of music theory in popular and classical repertoires. His first book, Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire was published in 2013, and his second, Desire in Chromatic Harmony, in 2020. He has published essays in academic journals on Alexander Skryabin, Karol Szymanowski, Charles Ives and Alexander von Zemlinsky, and on a range of music theoretical topics. In addition to his interest in Western art-music from the turn of the twentieth century, Kenneth combines music theory with continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. His next book, Listening to the Unconscious (2022), co-authored with philosopher Stephen Overy, explores psychoanalytic theory through a study of popular music. Kenneth also researches popular music theory, with a co-edited book (The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches, 2018) and academic journal essays on Arab Strap, Modest Mouse, and Suede.

Kenneth served as events officer for the SMA from 2010 until he was elected president in 2019.

Peter H. Smith

Email: peter.h.smith.80@nd.edu

Peter H. Smith, professor of music at the University of Notre Dame, earned his Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University, where he was a recipient of the prestigious Whiting Dissertation Fellowship. He also holds M.M. and B.M. degrees in viola performance from The Juilliard School, where his principal teacher was the famed Viennese violist Paul Doktor.

Smith’s research interests include the instrumental music of Brahms and related composers, Schenkerian approaches to analysis, and theories of musical form and expression. In addition to numerous articles on these topics, he has written about them in a book, Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet, and a co-edited essay collection, Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning, both published by Indiana University Press. He recently co-edited, with Julian Horton, a special issue on sonata typology for Music Analysis and is especially proud of the five articles he has published in that journal.

Smith is a past president and vice president of the American Brahms Society and continues his longstanding service on the board of directors of that organization and his work as editor-in-chief of Music Theory Spectrum (2020–2024). Smith delivered the inaugural lecture for the Oxford University Seminar in Music Theory & Analysis (2018) and has presented his research across the USA and internationally, including as far afield as Durham (UK), Leuven (Belgium), Tallinn (Estonia), Strasbourg, Moscow, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Taipei.

Daniel Walden

Email: daniel.walden@yale.edu

Daniel Walden is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Yale University. His research combines practice-based methods of inquiry with the global histories of science, society, and technology.  His first book, According to Nature: The Choropoetics and Global Politics of Just Intonation, traces the emergence of just-intonation theories and practices from a global network of scholars, musicians, and instrument builders spanning Europe, Japan, India, Mexico, and West Africa. Ongoing projects include two volumes featuring translations of the nineteenth-century musical scholarship of Tanaka Shōhei and Johanna Kinkel, as well as the development of New Instruments For Theory [NIFTY], an open-access database of digital and DIY instruments designed to unlock new directions in music-theoretical research and pedagogy. Previously Daniel was Assistant Professor in Music Analysis at Durham University, and Junior Research Fellow in Music at University of Oxford. He earned his MPhil in Music Studies as a Gates Scholar at University of Cambridge and a PhD in Music at Harvard University.  Daniel’s work appears in History of Humanities, The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, Early Music History, Keyboard Studies, Greek and Roman Musical Studies, and Music Theory Online.