My research interests lie primarily in tonal analysis, transformational theory, the history of music theory, popular music, and music in contemporary digital media. My work has been published in journals such as Music Theory Online, Music Analysis, Music Theory & Analysis, The Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, The Journal of Sound and Music in Games, and in collections including The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Music in Video Games. On this page, I have collected my publications and works in progress into three major research projects. For more information on my work, see my full C.V. here.

Recomposition in Music Theory

My dissertation dealt with the phenomenon of recomposition in music theory and analysis: cases when theorists have re-written a piece of music in order to make an argument about its structure, meaning, or idealized form. Some recompositions are offered as corrections, as in the famous case of Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet (K. 465). Others are hypothetical, proposing prototypical models for unusual passages; making arguments about the composer’s process or intent (as a kind of “sketch study in reverse”); or even to clarify a given theorist’s own ideas. While theoretical recompositions have been a tool of music theorists since the 1700s, and are common in teaching and scholarly writing today, they have rarely been studied as a coherent practice in themselves. As paratextual images that accompany analytical prose, recompositions—and musical examples in general—often escape scrutiny, taking on rhetorical force by pure indexicality: “As Figure 1 demonstrates…” Drawing together scholarship about musical borrowing, authorship, and influence with reflections on analysis and music theory pedagogy (both historical and contemporary), I read recompositions as the result of individual and idiosyncratic encounters with music. I argue that in their use of music notation and their ability to tacitly summarize several steps of an argument, recompositions encode aesthetic values that are not always evident from the prose they accompany. Synthesizing these approaches, I describe a more general recompositional impulse that underlies such disparate topics as intertextuality, the perception and analysis of musical form, and the enharmonic tricks of 19th-century composers like Wagner, Schubert, and the Schumanns.

Publications and talks from this stream of research include:

The Music of Amy Beach

I am engaged in a long-term research project on the music of Amy Beach, which I approach from the standpoint of its inherent polyphony: Beach’s music draws together numerous compositional voices, ranging from folk music (her famous Gaelic symphony); the poets whose texts she sets; famous composers and their works (such as Beethoven, whose Pathetique sonata is the basis of her early song “A Rainy Day”); birdcalls and other sounds of nature (her “Hermit Thrush” pieces for solo piano); and even her past self (she quotes numerous early songs in her later instrumental works). I am currently outlining a book project tentatively titled “The World Cries Out for Harmony”: Amy Beach’s Compositional Voices, and have given several presentations on Beach’s music, including:

Popular Music, Screen Music, and Contemporary Digital Media

Along with my interests in the Classical and Romantic repertoires, I am actively involved with the study of popular music and media music (including film scores, video game soundtracks, and social media). Some of my publications and talks on this topic include:

Other Writings

A few uncategorized papers and presentations are collected here: