Research

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. ...

Spectralisms, IRCAM, 13 June 2018. Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group, Society for Music Theory, 8 November 2019. This paper illustrates how three of Gérard Grisey’s essays—“Réflexions sur le temps,” “La Musique: le devenir des sons,” and “Tempus ex machina”—accord with Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez on the structure of perception. Instead of purporting to prove direct influence, exploring their common ground clarifies and elaborates three central issues in Grisey’s writings: (1) the differentiation of time and how it casts music as a process of becoming; (2) the identification of tone with pulse on a spectrum of contraction and dilation; and (3) how Grisey’s later three-part theory of musical perception relates to his early distinction between measured and perceived time. ...

Society for Music Theory, 10 November 2017. This paper offers a narrative account of Darius Milhaud’s cantata Le Château du feu and draws from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilles Deleuze, and Lawrence Kramer in order to critique the epistemological relation of description to music’s ontologies. The Lacanian notion that knowledge is mediated by language hearkens to Nietzsche, and fortifies Kramer’s assertion that “there is no such thing as music”—or, no such transcendental category. Instead, music emerges as a perceptual category as subjects circumnavigate their experiences with all kinds of description. Deleuze’s Bergsonism deconstructs the temporal distinction between past and present, asserting that consciousness emerges through the hermeneutic process of actualization, in which the subject recovers a recollection from the ontological past and re-perceives it in the psychological present. Through actualization, the descriptive associations that subjects ascribe to music determine the epistemological form of its knowable ontologies: music is the aggregate of its descriptions. In other words, where there is music, there is hermeneutics.

Boyer College Graduand Student Forum, 24 April 2016. This paper investigates the phenomenological model of subjectivity that undergirds the theoretical descriptions of melody, harmony, and form in G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics. While scholars such as Philip Alperson and Martin Donougho have denounced the Aesthetics for uninformedly devaluing instrumental music, the text’s explicit references to instrumental sonata form provide evidence to the contrary. For Hegel, music “sounds out” the subject, reverberating within the catacombs of the mind to illuminate the depths of the inner self. Considering Hegel invites us to reconsider music in terms of how it organizes events and demarcates the flow of time. ...

Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, 8 April 2016. University of Michigan Graduate Music Research Conference, 20 March 2016. This study explores the hermeneutic efficacy of topic theory in the context of 20th-century American music by theorizing Paul Creston’s adaptation of contemporary plainchant practice as a recurring topic in his compositions. The paper considers the definitions of “topic” offered by Leonard Ratner, Robert Hatten, Raymond Monelle, Michael Klein, and Danuta Mirka. In doing so, it frames Creston’s indexing of chant first as a generative style—furnishing the textural and thematic content of homogeneous works—and second as a topic that injects this style into distinct spaces of Creston’s larger, heterogeneous compositions. Interpreting Creston’s chant as a topic per se is justified according to Hatten because of its productivity, and to Lawrence Kramer because it opens hermeneutic windows and topical fields that construct interpretive frameworks for narrative. ...