My research explores why people value music, and how the values attributed to it intersect with broader debates in cultural, political and social life. I’m particularly fascinated by the ways in which sound reproduction technologies - radio, gramophone, television - have influenced both listening practices and ideas about how we listen to music. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how pedagogic initiatives in schools, universities and the cultural sector reflect widely-held beliefs about music; and about how musical discussions have responded to the changing political currents of late 19th- and 20th-century modernity.

The current focus of these interests is a new AHRC-funded project, “The Everyday Listeners.” I’ll be investigating mid-twentieth-century America’s classical music industry from the perspective of “everyday” listeners, using fan mail sent to Leonard Bernstein and newly collected oral histories.

My previous project centered around the idea of the “middlebrow,” a concept that was relatively new to Musicology. My first book, The Art of Appreciation, asked why and how “music appreciation” – a mainstay of middlebrow cultural practice – came to have such a pervasive presence in twentieth-century musical life. I also co-edited two multi-authored publications – a Journal of the American Musicological Society Colloquy on “Musicology and the Middlebrow” and the Oxford Handbook to Music and the Middlebrow ­– which brought together popular and art music scholars to explore the very different ways in which the “middlebrow” might be used by musicologists.

I’ve won several awards for my work, including the Royal Musical Association’s Jerome Roche Prize (2015) and the Music & Letters Westrup Prize (2015) – both for articles that came out of my doctoral research on music in World War Two Britain. I’m on the editorial boards of Naxos Musicology Online and Twentieth-Century Music, and have previously served on the Board of the North American British Music Studies Association and as student representative for the Royal Musical Association.