David is a musicologist and cultural historian. After gaining his Ph.D. (Harvard 2010), he took up a Research Fellowship in Class I at Christ’s College, and subsequently accepted a Lectureship, and later, a Readership, at the University of Bristol. He returned to the Faculty of Music at Cambridge, and to Christ’s, in 2015.
His research focuses on nineteenth-century intellectual history, Richard Wagner, and the philosophy of technology. Other interests include Franz Liszt and post-Classical Weimar, Posthumanism and musical creativity in the digital age.
His first book, Wagner's Melodies (CUP 2013), examines the cultural and scientific history of melodic theory in relation to Wagner's writings and music. Other research interests are reflected in three volumes edited for Cambridge University Press, on Opera and the Scientific Imagination (2019), Music in Digital Culture (2019), and most recently Wagner in Context (2024).
In his research and teaching, David approaches music and its cultures in the widest interdisciplinary sense, incorporating perspectives of cultural and intellectual history, music theory and the history of science, and as well as mediality and the philosophy of technology.
Between 2015-21, he was Principal Investigator for an ERC Starting Grant entitled 'Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century.' This examined how a scientific-materialist conception of sound was formed alongside a dominant culture of romantic idealism. Four postdoctoral research fellows joined the project, whose numerous publications are open access.
Alongside this, work on a hitherto unheard Italian opera by Franz Liszt, Sardanapalo, was supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize. This resulted in the first critical edition and a performing edition of Liszt's music, whose world premiere took place in 2018, with subsequent performances in Italy, Germany, America, Austria and most recently Hungary. Upon release, the first recording was the #1 best-selling classical album in the UK.
Major prizes for research include the Lewis Lockwood Award and the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society, the Bruno Nettl Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Donald Tovey Memorial Prize of the University of Oxford, and a Deems Taylor Award of the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers.
When time permits, David is active as a pianist and conductor, having recorded with the Philharmonic Orchestra, and performing in Europe and on both coasts of the US.
