Dr Oliver Chandler
Oliver Chandler is departmental lecturer in music analysis at the University of Oxford and an academic professor at the Royal College of Music, where he teaches style composition, analysis, and history. Previously, he was director of studies in music at Hertford and Keble Colleges (2023—2024). Before he arrived in Oxford, in 2020, he had held lecturing positions at Anglia Ruskin, King’s College London, Goldsmiths, and Royal Holloway Universities. In 2024, he was awarded the Adele Katz Early Career Researcher Award by the Society for Music Analysis. The award committee described him as an ‘outstandingly talented early-career theorist and analyst with the potential to make a truly significant and lasting contribution to our discipline.’ He is the co-author, with J. P. E. Harper-Scott, of Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music (Routledge 2024), the co-editor, with Thomas Hyde, of Born by the Thames: Stephen Dodgson, a Centenary Celebration (de la Porte, 2024), which received a four-star review in BBC Music Magazine, and the author of A Twelve-Tone Repertory for Guitar: Julian Bream and the British Serialists, 1956–1983 (GFA Monographs, 2023). Research on the classical guitar repertoire and Elgar’s chamber music, among other topics, has appeared in journals such as Music & Letters, Music Analysis, Music Theory and Analysis and Music Theory Online. He sits on the editorial board of Soundboard Scholar and he is a member of the Cambridge Cohort for Guitar Research. A keen guitarist himself, he was awarded the guitar-departmental prize by Trinity Laban in 2015.
Books
- Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music, with J. P. E. Harper-Scott (London: RMA monograph series, 2024).
- Born by the Thames: Stephen Dodgson, a Centenary Celebration, ed. with Thomas Hyde (de la Porte, 2024).
- A Twelve–Tone Repertory for Guitar: Julian Bream and the British Serialists, 1956–1983 (Guitar Foundation of America Refereed Monograph Series, Volume 4 (2023), eds Nathan Cornelius & Jonathan Leathwood)
Journal Articles
- ‘Phasic Dissonance, Timbral Contrast: Analyzing Twentieth-Century Guitar Harmonies with Discrete Fourier Transform’, with Isabella Thorneycroft, Music Analysis 43/1 (2024): 77–113
- ‘Reginald Smith Brindle’s Concept of Tonal–Atonal Equilibrium in Theory and Practice’, Soundboard Scholar 7 (2021): 1–24
- ‘Tonal Dodecaphony and Sentential Form: Extracts from Humphrey Searle’s Symphony No. 2, Op. 33’, Music Theory & Analysis 8/2 (2021): 43–53
- ‘Structural Dissonance Reimagined: the Finale of Elgar’s Violin Sonata, Op. 82’, Music & Letters 102/2 (2021): 294–316
- ‘“Octatonic” voice leading and diatonic function in the Allegro molto from Elgar’s String Quartet in E minor, op. 83’, Music Theory Online 26/1 (2020) [8,500 words]
- ‘Diatonic Illusions and Chromatic Waterwheels: Edward Elgar’s Concept of Tonality’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 15/1 (2020): 3–29
- ‘A Diminished–Seventh Bassbrechung: Tonal Ambiguity and the Prolongation of Function in Edward Elgar’s String Quartet, 1st movement’, GAMUT: Online Journal of the Music–Theory Society of the Mid–Atlantic 9/1 (2020): 1–29
Book Chapters
- ‘Chapter 17: Eclectic Unities? Malcolm Arnold’s “Symphonic Thinking”’, The Symphony in Britain and Ireland Since 1900, ed. Nicholas Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5,500 words [commissioned; submitted third round of edits to the editor; anticipated publication July 2025])
- ‘Chapter 3: Tonality in Waltraute’s Plaint’ (co-authored with J. P. E. Harper-Scott) in Wagner Studies, ed. Steven Vande Moortele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [commissioned; in press; anticipated publication Winter 2024, 7,500 words])
- ‘Tonality and (the) “Beyond”: Elgar’s Gerontius and Piacevole’ in Art, Music, and Mysticism in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Michelle Foot and Corrinne Chong (Routledge July 2024): 213–230.
- ‘Stephen Dodgson’s Neo–Classical Language’, in Born By The Thames: Stephen Dodgson, A Centenary Celebration (de la Porte publishing, March 2024): 209–222
Reviews
Discrete Fourier Transform, PC Set Theory, Schenkerian Analysis, (neo-)Riemannian Theory, British Music, Guitar Studies, Schema Theory, the new Formenlehre