Welcome to my website - very much still under construction, but there you go. Gotta start somewhere!
There don't seem to be very many musicologists out there with websites beyond their staff pages on their universities' sites. Why? Are we naturally modest? Or predominantly technophobes? Or just so severely time-constrained that we don't get around to creating our own web presence?
If you tell people you're a musicologist - or more simply that you think about, write about and teach music - more often than not you're met with a blank stare. So why musicology? Another musicologist once told me that to him musicology was a matter of life and death. I thought it was twaddle then, and I still do. To me, the real essential is the music itself.
Ursula LeGuin once wrote, "Children brought up in great security, tribal or familial, aren't very aware of love, as I suppose fish aren't very aware of water." My mother brought me up in a house that was always full of music, on the radio, on the stereo, from her beloved piano and from my father's guitar. I was thirteen before I realised that not everyone could read music as easily as they read books.
My kids are growing up in a world in which music is even more pervasive than it was when I was young. It is a language that has the capacity to be understood by millions. If something is that powerful and that accessible, then it begs understanding, or at least thinking about. But thinking about music isn't really an end unto itself - for me, "applied musicology" is the key: history, theory and performance are all bound tightly together, and if you want to understand one, you'd better try to understand the other two as well.
You can find out all about my research - and how I try to bring it alive and make it mean something to other people - on these pages. But this is a personal site, not a university one - because being a musicologist is frequently not about being an academic, just a surely as being an academic is frequently not about being a musicologist.