Articles
The order of the middle movements in Mahler's Sixth Symphony
January 2016 … Read full text
Poetic Truths
The Wagner Journal | 2015 … Read full text
Review of Lies and Epiphanies: Composers and Their Inspiration from Wagner to Berg by Chris Walton.
Religious Art in the Twenty-First Century
11 August 2013 … Read full text
I want to ask a large question in a short space: whether it is possible in the West to produce genuine religious music in the twenty-first century. The problem is not a recent one, but goes back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the beginnings of Romanticism.
Robin Walker at 60
Tempo | July 2013 … Read full text
Refuge in the Forest
The Times Literary Supplement | January 2012 … Read full text
Review of Jean Sibelius and His World, ed. Daniel M. Grimley.
Birdsong and Music
1st July 2011 … Read full text
Many composers have been influenced by birdsong. Mozart treasured the songs of his pet starling, even giving the bird a ceremonial funeral. David has always been interested in the incorporation of the natural world into his music, even including birdsong in some recent compositions. This lecture will reflect on the relationships between music and the natural world and how a composer can be brought closer to one through the other and vice versa.
Tennis with Gershwin
The Times Literary Supplement | July 2010 … Read full text
Review of A Windfall of Musicians by Dorothy Lamb Crawford.
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Musical Opinion | July-August 2009 … Read full text
Review of the book by Alex Ross.
Renewing Musical Tradition
pp79-86, Redefining Musical Identities, ArtEZ Press (edited by Rokus de Groot, Albert van der Schoot) | 2007 … Read full text
Paper given at the conference 'Redefining Musical Identities' in Amsterdam, 31 August 2002.
Lucky thirteen
The Times Literary Supplement | November 2006 … Read full text
Review of Britten’s Children by John Bridcut.
Form-compelling
London Review of Books | 21 September 2006
Elgar's Falstaff: a Comparative Analysis
September 2006 … Read full text
The Art of the Fugue
London Review of Books | 2006 … Read full text
Expended version of a review of 'The Art of Fugue' by Joseph Kerman.
A Wistful Sophisticate
The Times Literary Supplement | 11 March 2005 … Read full text
Review of The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton eds.; Elgar: Child of Dreams by Jerrold Northrop Moore; Recording of Elgar: Piano Concerto realized by Robert Walker.
The Unperformed
The Times Literary Supplement | 16 January 2004
Britten and Berkeley
July 2003 … Read full text
Renewing the Past, some personal thoughts
pp199-212, Reviving the Muse: Essays on Music After Modernism, Claridge Press (edited by Peter Davison) | 2001 … Read full text
Kristallnachtmusic
The Times Literary Supplement | 17 November 2000
That Intimate, Familiar Sense
The Times Literary Supplement | 19 November 1999 … Read full text
Review of John Caldwell's The Oxford History of English Music, Volume Two: c.1715 to the present day.
Michael Tippett and the Fading 'Collective Imaginative Experience'
The Times Literary Supplement | 21 May 1999
The Sixth Symphony
pp366-375, The Mahler Companion, Oxford University Press (edited by Donald Mitchell, Andrew Nicholson) | 1999
Wagner, Lipiner, and the ''Purgatorio''
pp508-516, The Mahler Companion, Oxford University Press (edited by Donald Mitchell, Andrew Nicholson) | 1999
Nothing of the Circus
The Times Literary Supplement | 3 April 1998
The Music of English Pastoral
pp81-90, Town and Country (edited by Anthony Barnett, Roger Scruton, Jonathan Cape) | 1998 … Read full text
To the Point of Chaos
The Times Literary Supplement | 28 November 1997
All Art is a Diary?
The Times Literary Supplement | 17 January 1997
The Cycle of Seasons
The Times Literary Supplement | 19 July 1996
Mahler and Parsifal
Muzik & Wetenschap, Vol.V. No.3 | 1995/96
Royal Splendours
The Times Literary Supplement | 17 May 1995
Radical Angst
The Times Literary Supplement | 19 August 1994 … Read full text
Review of Expressionism in Twentieth Century Music by John C. Crawford and Dorothy L. Crawford.
This What You Call Music?
The Times Literary Supplement | 27 May 1994
The Flaying of Marsyas
Salisbury Review | March 1994
Landscape in British Music
Towards a new Landscape (edited by Bernard Jacobson) | 1993
Living Traditions
Musical Times | April 1993
Titian's Flaying of Marsyas as a Metaphor of Transformation
The Salisbury Review | 1993 … Read full text
Love Song for Alma
The Times Literary Supplement | 13 November 1992
That Carefree Feeling
The Times Literary Supplement | 10 April 1992
A Distant Fury of Battle
Agenda | 1992 … Read full text
A composer's response to Geoffrey Hill's 'Funeral Music'.
Ambiguous Utterances
The Times Literary Supplement | 23 August 1991
Romanticism in Unlikely Corners
The Times Literary Supplement | 26 April 1991
A Perverse Genius
The Salisbury Review | 1991 … Read full text
Review of Schoenberg's Error by William Thomson.