Oliver Chandler is Director of Studies in Music at Hertford and Keble Colleges, University of Oxford, and an academic professor at the Royal College of Music, where he leads the music analysis course and teaches musicianship and history. He previously held posts at Anglia Ruskin, King’s College London, Goldsmiths, and Royal Holloway.
In 2024 he received the Adele Katz Early Career Researcher Award from the Society for Music Analysis, whose 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.” His publications include Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music (Routledge, 2024, with J. P. E. Harper-Scott); Born by the Thames: Stephen Dodgson, a Centenary Celebration (de la Porte, 2024, co-edited with Thomas Hyde), which received a four-star review in BBC Music Magazine; and A Twelve-Tone Repertory for Guitar: Julian Bream and the British Serialists, 1956–1983 (GFA Monographs, 2023). His articles have appeared in Music & Letters, Music Analysis, Music Theory and Analysis, and Music Theory Online.
He is Critical Forum Editor at Music Analysis and Book and Score Editor at Soundboard Scholar, the leading journal of guitar studies. A guitarist by training, he was awarded Trinity Laban’s guitar departmental prize in 2015 and now directs the guitar orchestra at the Royal Greenwich Guitar Festival. He also contributes programme notes for the Julian Bream Trust.
Discrete Fourier Transform, PC Set Theory, Schenkerian Analysis, (neo-)Riemannian Theory, British Music, Guitar Studies, Schema Theory, the new Formenlehre
