Research
Research interests
- Queer Music Theory19th-Century European Art SongTheories of European Common-Practice HarmonyMusic Theory and Analysis Franz SchubertHeinrich Schenker
Current research
David's fields of research are: (a) the theory and analysis of common-practice European music, particularly of the 19th century; and (b) queer music theory. His doctoral thesis, 'The Poetics of Schubert's Song-Forms' (University of Oxford, 2008), examined the songs of the nineteenth-century Austrian composer Franz Schubert using Schenkerian techniques and close reading, and he has since published numerous articles on this subject in Music & Letters, Music Analysis and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. He also has a keen interest in Schenker studies, having co-edited, with Ian Bent and William Drabkin, Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence (Boydell & Brewer, 2014). David's more recent research, which is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship, considers the intersection of queer theory and music theory, and asks – among other things – how a composer's sexuality may or may not be relevant to the works they compose, and the role that music analysis might play in answering this question.