He is Emeritus Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has taught previously at the Institute of Musicology of the Masaryk University in Brno. As a musicologist he has specialized in the music of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and he is currently the Area Editor for articles on Czech and Slovak Music for the online Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In 2018 he received a Leoš Janáček Memorial Medal from the Leoš Janáček Foundation for his contributions to Czech music and culture. As a translator of Czech literature, he has recently published And My Head Exploded: Tales of Desire, Delirium and Decadence from Fin-de-Siècle Prague (London, 2018), a selection of short stories, and Karel Hynek Mácha, Gypsies (London, 2019), a translation of Mácha’s Cikáni.