Dr Nicholas McKay is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Sussex, where he has worked since completing his PhD at Durham University in 1998. He has run regular lecture courses on Opera and Music Drama for the last ten years and was Head of the Sussex Music Department (2001-2006) before taking-on his current post as a Director for the School of Humanities.
In 2005 he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and will shortly be publishing a monograph on the music of Igor Stravinsky. He has presented numerous international papers and published a number of articles on the semiotics of Stravinsky’s music, music analysis and opera and music theatre. He is assistant editor for The Journal of Music and Meaning and has been a regular speaker at Glyndebourne for many years, giving talks at festival and touring productions of Albert Herring, La Boheme, La Cenerentola, Le nozze di Figaro, Rodelinda, La Traviata, Tristan und Isolde and The Turn of the Screw. He has written the commentary for the Glyndebourne Opera Bite CD on Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.