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.
Dr Oliver Chandler
Stipendiary Lecturer
Academic background
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.”
Teaching
Stipendiary Lecturer in Music (music analysis, musicianship and history)
Research interests
Recent Publications
Books
- Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music, with J. P. E. Harper-Scott (London: RMA monograph series, 2024).
- Born by the Thames: Stephen Dodgson, a Centenary Celebration, ed. with Thomas Hyde (de la Porte, 2024).
- A Twelve–Tone Repertory for Guitar: Julian Bream and the British Serialists, 1956–1983 (Guitar Foundation of America Refereed Monograph Series, Volume 4 (2023), eds Nathan Cornelius & Jonathan Leathwood)
Journal Articles
- ‘Phasic Dissonance, Timbral Contrast: Analyzing Twentieth-Century Guitar Harmonies with Discrete Fourier Transform’, with Isabella Thorneycroft, Music Analysis 43/1 (2024): 77–113
- ‘Reginald Smith Brindle’s Concept of Tonal–Atonal Equilibrium in Theory and Practice’, Soundboard Scholar 7 (2021): 1–24
- ‘Tonal Dodecaphony and Sentential Form: Extracts from Humphrey Searle’s Symphony No. 2, Op. 33’, Music Theory & Analysis 8/2 (2021): 43–53
- ‘Structural Dissonance Reimagined: the Finale of Elgar’s Violin Sonata, Op. 82’, Music & Letters 102/2 (2021): 294–316
- ‘“Octatonic” voice leading and diatonic function in the Allegro molto from Elgar’s String Quartet in E minor, op. 83’, Music Theory Online 26/1 (2020) [8,500 words]
- ‘Diatonic Illusions and Chromatic Waterwheels: Edward Elgar’s Concept of Tonality’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 15/1 (2020): 3–29
- ‘A Diminished–Seventh Bassbrechung: Tonal Ambiguity and the Prolongation of Function in Edward Elgar’s String Quartet, 1st movement’, GAMUT: Online Journal of the Music–Theory Society of the Mid–Atlantic 9/1 (2020): 1–29