David Trippett is Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His research focuses on nineteenth-century intellectual history, Richard Wagner, and the philosophy of technology. He has published six books, including monographs about Richard Wagner’s melodic theory and German self-consciousness (Wagner’s Melodies, 2013) and the surprising debates over sound among nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists (Sound in Mind and Body, 2026), as well as four edited volumes on The Origins of Music (2012), Music in Digital Culture (2019) and Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination (2019), and Wagner in Context (2024).
His research has received prizes from the American Musical Society, the Society for Music Analysis, the Society for Ethnomusicology, an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, and a Phillip Leverhulme Prize. Between 2015-2020, he was Principal Investigator for an ERC Starting Grant on ‘Sound and Materialism in the Nineteenth Century’.
In more practical work, his editions of Liszt’s unfinished Italian opera Sardanapalo (Neue Liszt Ausgabe / Schott) has been performed in eight countries, and, as pianist and conductor, he recently recorded three CDs of contemporary music with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London.
