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.

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.