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Profile
I came up to Cambridge in 2017 as an undergraduate of Gonville & Caius College – next door to Trinity – and spent a very happy seven years there completing all my degrees without breaks. My interest in the theory behind music first arose when writing undergraduate assignments in analysis (2017–20). Postgraduate study into the late works of the Russian Theosophist composer Alexander Scriabin followed (2020–24), where I was fortunate enough to be supervised by Nicholas Marston.
For three years, I was head of Oxbridge admissions at Sir Joseph William’s Mathematical School, Rochester. I was elected a charitable trustee of the UK-based Society for Music Analysis in 2024 and am also a pianist and occasional composer.
Teaching
I teach analysis papers across all three years of the undergraduate Music Tripos in Cambridge and have supervised a substantial number of third-year coursework portfolios, where topics have ranged from J. S. Bach’s fugues in performance through to Schenkerian analysis of Jazz. On occasion, I also lecture in analysis for the Music Faculty. For three years, I taught the complete ‘harmony’ pathway in tonal skills at Gonville & Caius College, alongside various miscellaneous subjects including composition and music history.
Research
Broadly, my research explores the fundamental issues underpinning musical style, structure, form and content; in sum: ‘how do the notes work?’ Specifically, my research addresses harmonic questions pertaining to the strange works of Alexander Scriabin and to the enigmatic ‘free atonal’ corpus of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern). Published work so far has developed a renewed musical set theory that maps various kinds of symmetrical pitch collections onto repertoires often thought unsuitable for such method. My writings have also dealt with concepts such as ‘recomposition’, sketch study, sonata form, ‘Russian-ness’, disability interfaces with musicology, and Bloomian influence theory.
Selected Publications
Books:
Webern’s Lost Cello Sonata and Music in the Aphoristic Style (Routledge: 2026). {RMA monographs}
Scriabin’s Late Works and the Holy Grail of Music Analysis (Open Book Publishers: forthcoming).
Articles and Chapters:
(forthcoming) ‘Disentangling Influence and Inheritance: When Scriabin Met Stravinsky’, Journal of Musicology 44/i.
(forthcoming) ‘A Matter of Context; or, Webern: The Second Coming?’, Music & Letters [tbc.].
(forthcoming) ‘Gendered Harmony and Unsung Collections: Two Debussy Rabbit Holes’, Music Analysis 45/ii.
(forthcoming) ‘Music as “Diegesis-Determinant”: Disability and the Representation of Madness in The ‘Bathroom Dance’ Scene, from Joker (2019)’, in L. Parsons & B. Ravenscroft (eds.), Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers, Vol. 4 (Oxford University Press).
(2025) ‘Scriabin’s Lisztian-Stravinskian Sonata Forms’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 150/i.
(2024) ‘Alban Berg’s Op. 5/ii and the Concept of Recomposition’, Music Analysis 42/iii.
(2024) ‘Harmonic “Quality” and Set-Class Structure: Schoenberg’s Opus 19 No. 2 Reconsidered’, Music Theory Online 30/i.
Public Engagement
I write often on music-analytical topics for a general audience; some examples are enclosed below:
‘Rajan Lal Reflects on 150 Years of Alexander Scriabin and the Analytical Task of “Remystifying”’, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Music Research Blog, December 2022
‘Rajan Lal Reflects on Scriabin, Symmetry, and the Second Viennese School’, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Music Research Blog, October 2024