Professor Peter Asimov

peter.asimov@music.ox.ac.uk 

A specialist in twentieth-century art music with particular expertise in French modernism, Peter Asimov 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 He has also spearheaded the recovery of Loriod's previously unknown and unpublished compositional legacy, leading to revisionist perspectives on music by Messiaen, Boulez, and Cage, with premiere performances and recordings scheduled through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.

Publications

Peer-reviewed journal articles

• (2027) Yvonne Loriod’s Prepared Pianos’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 80/1 forthcoming.
• (2025) ‘The Hidden Poetics of Messiaen’s “Serialism”’, Journal of Musicology, 42/2, pp. 115–52 <https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2025.42.2.115>
• (2024) ‘The melakartas and the “république modale”: naturalizing Indian scales in French musical modernism’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 149/2, pp. 383–439 <https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2024.21>
• (2024) ‘Yvonne Loriod and the practice of analytical memory’ [with Christopher Brent Murray], Music Analysis, 43/3, pp. 331–79 <https://doi.org/10.1111/musa.12235>
• (2023) ‘Fétis, Gevaert, and their Indo-European Hypotheses: echoes of comparative philology, language, and “race” in early Belgian musicology’, Revue belge de musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap, 77, pp. 23–48
• (2021) ‘Transcribing Greece, arranging France: Bourgault-Ducoudray’s performances of authenticity and innovation’, 19th-Century Music, 44/3, pp. 133–68 <https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2021.44.3.133>
• (2018) ‘Une invention “essentiellement française”: seeing and hearing the ondes Martenot in 1937’, Musique–Images–Instruments: revue française d’organologie et d’iconographie musicale (CNRS Éditions), 17, pp. 106–26

Selected book chapters

• (2025) ‘Antoine Meillet’s Music Lessons: Pierre Aubry, Maurice Emmanuel, and the Search for “Indo-European” Rhythm , in Sonic Circulations: Music, Modernism, and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. by Emily I. Dolan, Emily MacGregor, and Arman Schwarz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 44–74 <https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.19724104.6>
• (2025) ‘La patrie, à plusieurs échelles: la modalité dans Héliogabale, entre région et “race”’, in Déodat de Séverac: un musicien occitan entre régionalisme et modernité, ed. by Stefan Keym and Ludovic Florin (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi), pp. 169–86
• (2025) ‘Arbitrating “Authenticity”: the Schola Cantorum’s Concours de chant populaire (1903–04) and its losers’ in European Musical Competitions, 1700–1940: History, Context and Meanings, ed. by Charles Edward McGuire, Speculum Musicae 57 (Turnout: Brepols), pp. 253–87
• (2023) ‘Yvonne Loriod, ultramodernist: preliminary glimpses at a compositional legacy’ in Women Composers in New Perspectives, 1800–1950: Genres, Contexts and Repertoires, ed. by Mariateresa Storino and Susan Wollenberg, Speculum Musicae 49 (Turnout: Brepols), pp. 265–90
• (2023) ‘Messiaen and classical India and Greece’, in Robert Sholl, ed., Messiaen in Context (Cambridge University Press), pp. 37–45 <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108768290.005>
• (2022) ‘Hétérotopies de la musicologie: le cas de l’Encyclopédie de Lavignac (1913-1931)’ in Hamdi Makhlouf et al., eds., Musicologies francophones et circulation des savoirs en contextes multiculturels (Tunis: Centre des musiques arabes et méditerranéennes), pp. 101–27