Cambridge Alumni

Department Member, Faculty of Music

About

I was born in Israel in 1972. I did my Bachelor’s degree (in musicology and general interdisciplinary studies in humanities) at Tel Aviv University, and my Master’s degree (in Historical Musicology) at King’s College, London.

In 2004, I completed my doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University, under the supervision of the renowned Bach scholar and performer John Butt, on the performance history of Bach’s B-minor Mass (Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception: An Examination of the B minor Mass on Record).

Since then, I have lectured extensively on Bach performance in the 20th and early 21st centuries, published several articles on the subject, and was awarded a British Academy Visiting Fellowship to further study this fascinating topic. My ultimate aim in this field is to produce a book-length study: The Fifth Evangelist, the Impassioned Rhetorician and the Practical Musician: Re-Creating Bach’s Vocal Music in the Age of Recordings.

My other research interests include opera (especially Monteverdi and Mozart), with a focus on issue of character credibility and the creation of sympathetic villains; the reflection of polemics on music and aesthetics in musical works, especially in the baroque era; the nature and validity of historical performance; the relationship between performance and analysis; music and rhetoric; and, more generally, the relationship between text and music.

I am also studying contemporary Israeli music, with planned papers on the music of stylistic eclecticism in the music of Josef Bardanashvili, and musical-narrative strategies and the representation of the Holocaust in Ella Milch-Sheriff’s And the Rat Laughed.