Robert Sholl

Robert Sholl was educated in Australia, France, and England. In Melbourne, he studied the piano with Mack Jost and Michael Brimer, and the organ with Lindsay O’Neill. In France he studied at the Sorbonne, analysis and improvisation with Michel Fischer, and analysis with Jacques Castérède. He studied the organ with Olivier Latry (Notre-Dame de Paris). In England he worked with Arnold Whittall, Daniel K.L. Chua and John Deathridge at Kings College, London on Messiaen.

Robert is a lecturer in Academic Studies (Royal Academy of Music), Professor of Music (University of West London), and has taught at King’s College, London and at the Royal College of Music. He has tutored for and is an examiner for the Royal College of Organists. His research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century music, critical theory, musical analysis, performance, artistic research, improvisation, somatic techniques (especially The Feldenkrais Method), music and psychoanalysis, music and spirituality, listening, and film music.

Robert edited Messiaen Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Contemporary Music and Spirituality (Routledge, 2017) with Sander van Maas. He edited (with George Parsons) James MacMillan Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Olivier Messiaen in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and is the author of a monograph, Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography (Reaktion Press, 2024). He has published articles on Messiaen and Jean-Louis Florentz in The Oxford Handbook to Spectralism (2023), and on artistic research and improvisation to film in Perspectives of New Music (2020).

He has given papers at Washington D.C, Milwaukee, and Boston (AMS), Princeton, Brown and Boston Universities, the CNSM de Lyon (France), Luleå University of Technology (Piteå, Sweden), King’s College London, the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. He has organized four conferences at Southbank.

Robert is a Feldenkrais practitioner. He has published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and edited The Feldenkrais Method in Creative Practice: Dance, Music, and Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Robert has given recitals in the Festival de la Musique Sacrée at the Cathedral of St-Malo, at La Madeleine (Paris), Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, and Notre-Dame de Paris. He performed the complete Messiaen organ works (2016-2017), and the complete Vierne symphonies, Duruflé works, and pieces by Tournemire, at Arundel Cathedral (2021-23). He recorded Les ombres du Fantôme at Coventry and Arundel Cathedrals: 14 improvisations (with electronics by Justin Paterson) that thematically shadow Leroux’s novel (Divine Art/Métier, 2024), and he has created a KEF project on film improvisation for schools.