Research

VI Encontro, Associaçāo Brasileira de Teoria e Análise Musical, 18 August 2025 (online). Narrative Walks Through Music, University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia, 5 October 2024 (online). This paper argues that the history of Anglophone topic theory has presented theorists with a false dichotomy between semiotics and hermeneutics. Though the introduction to The Oxford Handbook recognized topic theory as “the foremost branch of music semiotics” (Mirka 2014), this was not always the case. Until semiotics took hold of research on “music and meaning” in the 1990s with the work of Kofi Agawu, Robert Hatten, Naomi Cumming, and Raymond Monelle, musical topics were treated as part of the rhetorical structure of Enlightenment repertoire (Allanbrook 1983; Sisman 1993). Despite attempts to interpret topics through the lens of intertextuality rather than semiotics (Klein 2005; Kramer 2011), theorists have increasingly used topics to “verify” supposed correlations between musical signifiers and extramusical meanings. As a result, semiotics has postured as a self-standing activity that grounds hermeneutics in the “responsible” reconstruction of historical listening competencies (Sánchez-Kisielewska 2023). ...

Joint Meeting of the History of Theory and Disability Studies Groups of the American Musicological Society, Chicago, IL, 15 November 2024. To expand the limits of the global history of theory, Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding (2021) have drawn from speculative physics to suggest that the universe is fundamentally musical and therefore susceptible to an “intergalactic music theory of everything.” However, belief in music’s exceptional relationship with the “natural order” is not new (Rehding and Clarke 2001). It extends from Pythagoras’s resonance of the spheres, through Rameau’s treatise on harmony, and George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept—theories that have been respectively dismissed as scientifically dubious (Heller-Roazen 2011), racially problematic (Martin 2022), and neo-Romantic (Monson 1998). Such appeals have most recently been identified as a “barrier” to anti-racism for how they limit access to musical meaning by wielding “logical necessity” as a false aesthetic standard (Yust 2024). This short talk tries charitably to imagine how IGMTE’s quest “to boldly go where no [theorist] has gone before” can make theory more inclusive.

Music Theory Online 30, no. 1 (Spring 2024), doi:10.30535/mto.30.1.9. This essay gives a critical history of Anglophone topic theory as it evolved between the publication of Leonard Ratner’s Classic Music (1980) and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (Mirka 2014). Throughout this period, topic theory transformed from the identification of “characteristic figures” in eighteenth-century music into an analytical strategy for the intersubjective verification of correspondences between musical signifiers and extramusical meaning. Though Melanie Lowe (Lowe 2007) upheld the intertextuality of topics as a way past music’s “flawed” opposition with the extramusical, the binary has exerted sustained influence even as topic theory has advanced beyond the eighteenth-century canon to encompass more repertoires and interpretive methodologies. And because the musical-extramusical opposition finds its roots in the nineteenth-century idea of absolute music, it turns out that aspects of present-day topic theory are symptomatic of a much older way of thinking that evidently still gatekeeps what counts as knowledge about music. Historicizing topic theory provides interfaces for reconsidering the mutually constitutive relationships among music, meaning, analysis, interpretation, power, and politics.

American Musicological Society, November 2023. This paper shows how Darius Milhaud’s Les Six contemporaries incorporated his style of dissonant polytonality into their own compositions, which gave the group a semblance of aesthetic coherence while simultaneously painting the target of antisemitism on their backs. After the First World War, Jean Cocteau called for music to be rebuilt in a way that is “French, of France.” In response, Milhaud devised a compositional style that uses the musical resources of the French Baroque and Classic periods in pursuit of the sound of modernist alienation. Milhaud admired Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal system, yet rather than merely emulate Schoenberg’s Teutonic influence, he combined tonal elements from disjunct tonalities to create polytonal mélanges. Combination became a lifelong preoccupation for Milhaud, who at first stacked triads to yield dissonant sonorities but later combined differently pitched themes before juxtaposing whole movement forms. And despite the originality of Milhaud’s mélanges, his writings assert their connectedness to a contrapuntal tradition that extends back to Zarlino while circumnavigating German Romanticism’s corrupting obsession with tonal unity and organicism. Thus, Milhaud’s dissonances serve an agenda to establish his dual identity as a French and Jewish person by inventing a new compositional language that is nevertheless rooted in tradition (Fulcher 2005). ...

American Musicological Society, 12 November 2022. The idea that music is inherently unique or non-representational among the arts is experiencing a renaissance, instigated by the recent ontological and materialist turns. Abbate (2005, 2018) and Gallope (2017) extol music’s ineffability, while Brown (2019) praises music for creating meaning outside the framework of capitalism. These issues coagulate around the idea of music’s aesthetic autonomy, which appears to point toward a more relativist way of understanding music. As I argue, however, belief in autonomy as a special, ontological property of music conceals an interpretive politics that has withheld the status of “art” from black music. ...

19th-Century Music 45, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 204–219. doi:10.1525/ncm.2022.45.3.204. Mapping out several interpretations of free play in Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique helps parse the argument that “music is ineffable.” Although the argument is an old one, recent scholarship by Carolyn Abbate, Michael Gallope, and others has helped the idea of music’s ineffability resurface in recent years as a special, dialectical property of music’s sonic presence that perpetually defers statements about music’s meaning. However, the polysemy that results from this deferral is anchored, by the claim that “music is ineffable,” in the ontology of a preconceived notion of what “music” is. ...

International Musicological Society, Athens, Greece, August 2022. American Musicological Society, 12 November 2021. Music—Musicology—Interpretation, University of the Arts, Belgrade, Serbia, 21 October 2021. This paper interprets the rise of topic theory during the last several decades as a reaction to criticisms of musical analysis. The New Musicology moment challenged analysis’s involvement with musical autonomy (Wolff 1987), organicism (Street 1989), and structural processes (McClary 1986, 1991), primarily by unearthing their socio-political contexts (Savage 2010). Citing Lawrence Kramer’s (1990) call to open “hermeneutic windows” between the structural and contextual dimensions of musical works, theorists increasingly analyzed topics as quilting points between form and meaning. As a consequence, topic theory navigates around the same binary that the theory-versus-criticism debates of the 1980s and 90s did, between music and the extramusical: the signature dichotomy of musical absolutism (Dahlhaus 1989). Narrating the intellectual history of topic theory helps to circumnavigate this impasse by reimagining absolute music as an exclusive metaphysics that comes to life whenever musicological discourse marks the boundary between music and its other. ...

Society for Music Theory, 4 November 2021. This paper analyzes three types of dissonant structural combinations in Darius Milhaud’s string quartets: juxtapositions of harmonies, of discrete tonal melodies, and of formal plans. None of the most thorough analytical studies of Milhaud’s work—Paul Cherry (1980), Jeremy Drake (1989), Deborah Mawer (1997), Barbara Kelly (2003)—explore combination as an overarching technique. Yet scrutinizing the quartets shows how Milhaud conjoined progressively larger tonal structures throughout his life—first chords, then melodies, later forms—seeking a uniquely French style of dissonance, rooted in the tonal tradition. These conclusions support François de Médicis’s (2004) argument that contemporary criticisms of Milhaud’s alleged “atonality” were motivated more by antisemitism than by aesthetic values. ...

Western University of Ontario, Annual Graduate Symposium, 17 August 2019. Lately, the notion of ineffability has enjoyed renewed attention in the musical studies community, thanks in part to Carolyn Abbate’s 2018 SMT keynote address. In a famous 2004 article, Abbate opposed ineffability to the practice of hermeneutic (“gnostic”) interpretation, which to her seemed insufficient to capture any “drastic” experience of music itself. Over the years, this reversal of the traditional mind-over-matter hierarchy has been attractive because it seems to free music from being perpetually explained by a hegemonic, all-knowing, Cartesian subject. But not all revolutions are liberating. ...

Music and Philosophy Study Group, Royal Musical Association, 12 July 2019. This paper performs an archaeology of the critical musicology moment, suggesting that its tacit project of undermining musical autonomy remains unfinished because the historicity of absolute music has not yet ended. In his review of Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music, Leo Treitler gave a prophetic warning: “Kerman’s book can in the long run reinforce the unwholesome tendencies that worry him.” While Kerman’s original foil was “positivist musicology,” battle lines were drawn when American theorists perceived the book as an attack on their newly minted Society. Only three years after Treitler’s review, Lawrence Kramer and Scott Burnham pitted “criticism” and “analysis” against each other: the former had reductively mischaracterized the aims of analysis, while the latter still clung to a positivist will to truth. Instead of accepting what Gilles Deleuze calls a false problem, the criticism-versus-analysis discourse blossomed into a referendum on the relation of music’s formal elements to factors perceived as external to music. The ineffable menace that was calling to Susan McClary from behind Bluebeard’s final door was really a mounting anxiety over music’s ostensible autonomy. ...