Born in Cape Town, South Africa, he trained and worked in Johannesburg, Manchester, and London. Before arriving in Berkeley, he was a Research Fellow in Music at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, having also completed his doctoral dissertation there. His work involves the cultural history of performers and performance. He has published studies of danced Beethoven symphonies, colonial melodrama, the Romantic castrato, and English musical annuals in 19th-Century Music (2003), Opera Quarterly (2005), Cambridge Opera Journal (2005) and Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2006).