Robert Sholl’s publications on twentieth-century music include Messiaen Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Contemporary Music and Spirituality (Routledge, 2017) edited with Sander van Maas. He is editor (with George Parsons) of James MacMillan Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and editor of Olivier Messiaen in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He has forthcoming articles on Messiaen and Jean-Louis Florentz in The Oxford Handbook to Spectralism and he has written on Stravinsky (Le Sacre du printemps), John Adams, Luciano Berio, Harrison Birtwistle, Brian Ferneyhough, and Arvo Pärt. His research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century music, critical theory and philosophy, musical analysis, performance, improvisation, somatic techniques (especially The Feldenkrais Method), Music and Psychoanalysis, Music and Spirituality, listening, and film music.

Robert has organised four conferences at the Southbank centre and was recently the artistic director for the Royal College of Organists’ London Forum, which was a celebration of Messiaen’s work. He has given papers at the Universities of Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Cambridge, Oxford, London, Amsterdam, Boston, McGill, Fordham, Hong Kong, Melbourne, The Royal Academy of Music, The Royal College of Music, at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama for their conference on The Phantom of the Opera, three times at the American Musicological Society Conferences (Washington, Milwaukee and Boston), twice at EUROMAC (Leuven and Strasbourg), and at IRCAM. Robert has been an academic referee for major University Presses, Trinity Laban, has worked as consultant for the University of Aix-en-Provence, and has tutored for The Royal College of Organists. In 2020 he was an invited jury member for the Fundación BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Awards.

Robert is a trained Feldenkrais Practitioner and in 2019 he published a study of the Method and musical performance in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association entitled: “Feldenkrais’s touch, Ephram’s laughter, Gould’s sensorium: listening and musical practice between thinking and doing.” He is also the editor of The Feldenkrais Method in Creative Practice: Dance, Music and Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2021), which contains a separate study of Feldenkrais’s work, psychoanalysis and Glenn Gould.

Robert studied the organ with Olivier Latry (Notre-Dame de Paris). In 2016-17 he performed all of the organ works of Messiaen at Arundel Cathedral. (see https://arundelcathedral.uk/2016-messiaen-organ-concerts). Improvisation has become a regular part of Robert’s recitals and he has released improvisations to silent films: James Sibley Watson’s and Melville Webber’s The Fall of the House of Usher (for which he published a companion article in Perspective of New Music in 2020), and Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (Unmasking Scene), which was shown at The Barbican Centre in 2017. In 2021 he will be collaborating with Dr. Leslie McMurtry (University of Salford) to create the first radio dramatisation of this book. Improvisation has become a regular part of his recitals, and he teaches an undergraduate year 3/4 elective on improvisation to silent film. He has played at St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, St John’s, Smith Square, and twice both at the Madeleine and at Notre-Dame de Paris.