By profession, I am a musicologist. My recent publications include The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers (2024), and I write regularly for Glyndebourne Opera Festival. In 2025, I retired from my post as Professor of Music at King's College London, to pursue independent research projects, to teach piano, and return to the flute and recorder.

I offer two kinds of lessons. First, I offer adult beginners and returners the chance to explore music for enjoyment and personal growth. These lessons are supportive and tailored to your interests, be that with the piano or flute, music history, theory, or listening. (We might even choose to use the descant or alto recorder as your vehicle for exploring music, if that suits you best). I enjoy this kind of work because, when it comes to instrumental performance, I am myself a habitual returner. Though I studied the piano and flute beyond grade 8, and with eminent teachers, and though I have acted as an external examiner at the Royal Academy of Music, I am not a virtuoso performer and have not earned my living as a concert artist. Correspondingly, I am sensitive to the challenges faced by adults looking to pick up where they left off -- or start from scratch. Those returning to music may have mixed memories of childhood lessons, lament lost fluency, or be dogged by low confidence. Those beginning afresh may falsly assume they've left it 'too late', be impatient to progress, or they struggle to find suitable (not babyish) repertoire. I am sympathetic to these issues and strive to ameliorate them.

The second kind of lessons I offer are for university students, and independent researchers, comprising advanced music theory, harmony and counterpoint, and music-historical research. These lessons are quite different, focusing forensically on professional, technical skills and issues of methodology.