Dr Peter Asimov appointed to the Faculty of Music
Image credit Martin Bond
The Faculty of Music is delighted to announce that Dr Peter Asimov has been appointed as Associate Professor of Music, and Official Student (Tutorial Fellowship) at Christ Church.
Peter Asimov is currently Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge. A specialist in twentieth-century art music with particular expertise in French modernism, he combines archival research, music analysis, performance studies, and intellectual history to examine how music participates in the production of knowledge.
Peter is currently working on two major projects. One project, which began as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, reconfigures the dramatis personae of French postwar modernism, focusing on the ‘vanishing performers’ who have long been sidelined despite being integral to its history. As part of this project, he is co-authoring a critical biography of pianist and composer Yvonne Loriod (1924–2010). He has also spearheaded the recovery of Loriod's previously unknown and unpublished compositional legacy, leading to revisionist perspectives on music by Messiaen, Boulez, and Cage, with premiere performances and recordings scheduled through 2027. His edition of Loriod’s song cycle, Grains de cendre (1946), will be published later this year, and an article on Loriod’s works for prepared piano is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
His second project offers a musicological account of rhythm’s interdisciplinary intellectual history over the twentieth century, intervening in the emergent field of ‘critical rhythm’ studies. Retracing multilateral dialogues between music(ology) and the broader academic landscape in in Europe, North America, and the Black Atlantic, it recovers how musical sound and knowledge, via notions of ‘rhythm’, became a powerful force in fields ranging from experimental psychology and ergonomics to poetics and art criticism, with reverberations in musical practice.
Originally from New York City, Peter received his PhD from Clare College, Cambridge, with the support of a Gates Scholarship. His thesis traced the profound impact of nineteenth-century theories of language and 'race'—in particular, the Indo-European hypothesis (or 'Aryan myth')—on French musicology and composition over the century from 1850 to 1950, and won the International Musicological Society's Outstanding Dissertation Award. In 2025, he received the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association and the Adele Katz Early Career Award from the Society for Music Analysis.
Peter holds previous degrees in music from New College, Oxford, and in comparative literature (French and Sanskrit) from Brown University. In 2021, he was a Fondation Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellow for a year at the Laboratoire de Musicologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is also an accomplished pianist and chamber musician, having performed at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Louvre, the Seoul Arts Center, and across Cambridge.
