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.
Jack Boss
Email: jfboss@uoregon.edu
Jack Boss is Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Oregon. His research interests center on motive, harmony and long-range coherence in modern music. Boss has published many articles and book chapters on Schoenberg’s music among other topics (including a Music Theory Online article on George Walker’s piano music). He has presented his research throughout the United States, as well as in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, South Korea, and Brazil. His first book, Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014; in 2015 it was given the Wallace Berry Award by the Society for Music Theory. A companion volume, Schoenberg’s Atonal Music; Musical Idea, Basic Image, and Specters of Tonal Function, was published by Cambridge in 2019. The third and last book in the trilogy, Schoenberg’s Tonal Music: Depictive Text Painting and the Birth of the Musical Idea, is under contract with Cambridge Press and was completed in July 2025. He is excited about being part of the SMA’s work in preserving and developing the field of music analysis, particularly analytic approaches to modern music.
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.
James Donaldson
Email: james.donaldson@magd.ox.ac.uk
James Donaldson is a College Lecturer at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, following receipt of his PhD from McGill University. His research interests centre on the theory and analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first century music, primarily exploring issues of musical meaning through the lens of musical topics. His work appears in journals such as Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, and the Journal of Musicology and he has discussed his research on BBC Radio 3.
Rebekah Donn
Email: rebekah.donn@napier.ac.uk
Rebekah Donn is currently in the final stages of a PhD in Music Education at Edinburgh Napier University. Her PhD is supervised by Prof. Zack Moir and Bryden Stillie and comprises an investigation into the relationship between Scottish secondary music certification courses and degree-level music study. Rebekah also holds a BMus (Hons) degree from Edinburgh Napier University, an MMus degree from the University of Hull and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In her roles as trustee and (formerly) student representative Rebekah regularly conducts research for the SMA which focuses on the role of music analysis within the wider field of music education. This has involved co-authoring several reports and peer-reviewed publications published by the SMA and in Music Education Research, respectively. Rebekah has represented the SMA at several international conferences and is currently working on a project commissioned by the SMA on grant funding awarded to projects in music analysis alongside fellow trustee Ian Pace. Between 2020–2026 Rebekah worked as an associate lecturer on the BA (Hons) Music programme at Edinburgh Napier University where she designed and delivered a music theory course for undergraduate offer holders. Outside academia, Rebekah runs her own business in South Ayrshire teaching piano, flute, recorder and music theory.
Rafael (Ardi) Echevarria
Email: rafael.d.echevarria@durham.ac.uk
Rafael (Ardi) Echevarria is a music theorist and musicologist specialising in nineteenth-century musical form, with a growing interest in Filipino symphonic music. Ardi is completing a PhD at Durham University, supported by Northern Bridge and the Ramsay Centre. He earned First Class Honours and Masters degrees from the Sydney Conservatorium and was Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. Ardi has presented his research at numerous international conferences and taught at the Sydney Conservatorium and Durham. He is chair of the SMA’s Formal Theory Study Group and secretary for the Musicological Society of Australia’s Sydney chapter.
Annika Forkert
Email: annika.forkert@rncm.ac.uk
Annika is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Deputy Head of Undergraduate Programmes at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. Her research focuses on history, analysis, and aesthetics of: British music since 1900, microtonal music, serial music and modernism, and female composers. Her monograph Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Articles and book chapters are available on Walton’s modernist self-parody in the Facade versions (Music & Letters, 2026); Vaughan Williams’s film music (in Vaughan Williams and His World, eds. D. Grimley and B. Adams, Chicago University Press, 2023); bricolage techniques in British twentieth-century composers (in Mining the Gap: Musics with and after Tonality, e. P. Fleet, Routledge 2022); microtonal restraint (JRMA, 2020); the magical serialism of Lutyens’s O saisons, ô châteaux! (Twentieth Century Music, 2017). Annika holds a PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Magistra Artium in Musikwissenschaft and Philosophy from Humboldt-University Berlin. Previously a Council Member of the Royal Musical Association, she is the founder of the RMA mentoring scheme. In her spare time, Annika can be found listening to animals.
Rajan Lal
Email: rsl34@cam.ac.uk
Rajan Lal is a Title A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He took all his degrees in Music from Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a Senior Scholar and a Tammy Chen Graduate Scholar. His Ph.D. on late-Scriabin and the concept of ‘Scalar Quality’ was supervised by Prof. Nicholas Marston and advised by Paul Wingfield. Rajan’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Music Theory Online, Music Analysis, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of Musicology,and several locations elsewhere. He is the author of two book manuscripts: on Webern and aphoristic music [RMA monographs], and on Scriabin’s late works; at present, he is preparing Scriabin-Schoenberg-Stravinsky 1907–1915 for a leading University Press. Rajan has taught analysis, history, and tonal skills across all year groups on the Cambridge Music Tripos since 2021; he is also a food enthusiast.
Ian Pace
Email: ian@ianpace.com
Ian Pace is Professor of Music, Culture and Society and University Advisor: Interdisciplinarity at City St George’s, University of London, having previously held positions at the University of Southampton, Dartington College of Arts, Trinity Laban and the London College of Music and Media. His work interacts with musicology, history, politics and cultural sociology; his areas of academic expertise include the breadth of 19th, 20th and 21st century art music, performance studies musical historiography, music and culture under fascism and communism, the post-1945 avant-garde, in particular in West Germany, culture and society, critical methods for the study of culture, and music education at secondary and tertiary levels. He is also an internationally renowned pianist, specializing in avant-garde music, and has played in 25 countries, given over 350 world premieres, and recorded over 45 CDs.
He co-edited the volume Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) and authored the monograph Michael Finnissy’s The History of Photography in Sound: A Study of Sources, Techniques and Interpretation (Swarland: Divine Art, 2013). He is currently writing a new biography of Karlheinz Stockhausen for Reaktion Books. He has co-edited two further books, Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy: Bright Futures, Dark Pasts (London: Routledge, 2019), with Nigel McBride, and Writing about Contemporary Artists in Theory and Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), with Christopher Wiley. New edited volumes on Rethinking Contemporary Musicologies and Writing about Contemporary Musicians will appear in 2025-26, and he is also working on 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. He has also published articles in leading academic journals, Music and Letters, Music Analysis, Contemporary Music Review, TEMPO, The Musical Times, The Liszt Society Journal, International Piano, Musiktexte, Musik & Ästhetik, The Open Space Magazine, as well as writing for a wider audience in the Telegraph, the Spectator, London Review of Books, Times Higher Education Supplement, The Critic, The Conversation,International Piano and Music Teacher, as well as making a series of podcasts. He has been an SMA trustee since 2018, and has been Awards Officer since 2019.
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 2019, and as president from 2019 until 2024.
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.