Über unsere Autoren

Christopher’s professional background is in the public sector, and includes a spell in music librarianship. A composer, he is a keen follower of contemporary music and has attended all but four editions of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, including the first concert in 1978. Other musical passions include a fascination with the “bad boys” of the New Complexity fixation, particularly the god-like Brian Ferneyhough – arguably the best thing to have come out of Coventry. When not listening to Boulez, Christopher relaxes by frequenting the fields, orchards, woodlands and pubs on the Weald of Kent, where he lives.

Clare is a freelance writer and music critic from the UK, currently living in the Netherlands where she writes about Music, Food and Culture. Clare is a passionate musician, having learnt the violin and piano from an early age.  When not at her laptop writing, she spends her time nurturing the next generation of brass players, all from her Dutch kitchen in the sky. Read more at The Spidy Editor. 

Daniel Pratt trained in London, England, attending the Royal Ballet School Associates program before completing his vocational training at Central School of Ballet where he gained a BA (hons) in Professional Dance and Performance. Daniel joined The Sarasota Ballet in 2012, dancing a broad range of works including ballets by Ashton, Balanchine, MacMillan, and modern works by Taylor, Graham and Tharp. Daniel has also performed with Northern Ballet and English National Ballet. Daniel’s writing on dance has appeared in The Dancing Times and Tanz Magazine. Daniel currently serves on the board of the American Guild of Musical Artists.

David Grundy is a poet and scholar based in London. He is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and coeditor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023).

Deb joined Bachtrack in 2022 and commissions reviews and writing on ballet and dance. She was Royal Ballet School-trained and is a former principal dancer for companies including London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet) and Bayerisches Staatsballett. She has been writing for more than 30 years – publications have included Dancing Times, DanceTabs, Dance for You and Dance Europe. She also interviews for Voices of British Ballet, an oral archive of people who have worked in the industry in the UK. In addition to her writing, since 2016 she has been facilitating programmes that support victims of domestic abuse. Deb is passionate about her rescue dog, Bruce, and daughters (not in that order), swims a mile at least five days a week and is an avid reader.

Estudió en Madrid en el Real Conservatorio Superior de Música y Musicología en la Universidad Complutense. Se doctoró en la Universidad de La Rioja con una tesis sobre la música compuesta por Roberto Gerhard durante el magisterio de Arnold Schönberg. Ha sido investigador y profesor invitado en la Universidad Humboldt (Berlín), University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths, University of London, entre otras. Actualmente es profesor e investigador senior (Ramón y Cajal) en el Dpto. de Musicología de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Formerly Chief Classical Music Critic of The Independent, Edward Seckerson is a writer, broadcaster, podcaster, and musical theatre aficionado. He wrote and presented the long-running BBC Radio 3 series Stage & Screen, in which he interviewed many of the biggest names in the business – among them Julie Andrews, Liza Minnelli and Stephen Sondheim. During his journalistic career he has written for most major music publications and is still on the panel of Gramophone magazine. He appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and presented the 2007 series of the musical quiz Counterpoint. On television, he has commentated a number of times at the Cardiff Singer of the World competition. He has published books on Mahler and the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

Eleanor is a writer and librettist. Her work has appeared in all kinds of places from the Royal Opera House to the foot tunnels beneath the Elephant and Castle roundabout, and she has written arts reviews and features for British papers and magazines. Having begun her working life in theatre, she switched to publishing and later taught creative writing at the University of Brighton and Birkbeck. Currently based in the Netherlands, she teaches at the University of Utrecht. Eleanor plays violin and sings, though not usually at the same time, and has recently taken up speed-skating.

After completing their Master's degree in Musicology in Rome, Elena has now moved to Berlin to dedicate themselves to more things musical. With a publication on Béla Bartók and a seminar at the Humboldt-Universität underway, their interests mostly veer toward 20th-century opera, with some forays into queer musicology. Some of their latest undertakings also include oboe lessons, stencil-making and tea-making.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosophy scholar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE–PSL), where her research focuses on ancient ideas of divination and salvation. Trained in ballet for over a decade, she later studied philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Bologna, taking courses in the history of dance, arts, and performance. For her work, she has travelled extensively and has lived in Italy, the UK, Belgium and now France – always taking every opportunity to see dance performances wherever she goes. Besides her academic career, she writes about dance, exploring its power to reimagine tradition and open meaningful dialogues with the present.