In broad terms, I am interested in the music and culture of late 19th and early 20th centuries. More specifically, my research concentrates on two general areas. The first (and the subject of my dissertation) is the revival of early music in the first half of the 20th century, with a particular focus on its interdisciplinary connections and conjunctions with the nascent modernist movement. The second area is music technology, encompassing issues of musical representation and reproduction, particularly as concerns player instruments and early phonograph culture.

While much of my research operates within the sphere of "Western art music," my work frequently engages with other musical traditions—including popular, jazz, folk, experimental, and electronic—and I find the disciplinary boundaries between such genres to be increasingly out-moded and unnecessary.

My dissertation, entitled Revival and Antiquation: Modernism's Musical Pasts argues for a reappraisal of the first decades of the early music revival, focusing on interdisciplinary connections (with art, literature, and the historical preservation movement), as well as the influence the revival had on contemporary musical culture and performance aesthetics.

 

Click here to see my Curriculum Vitae.

 

"The Death and Second Life of the Harpsichord"

(Presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Nashville, Tennessee.)

Abstract: In an oft-quoted witticism attributed to the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, the harpsichord is likened to “two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.” While this quip has undoubtedly been repeated due to its comic appeal, it can be argued that the image it calls forth may in fact be an uncannily appropriate symbol for the history of the instrument’s reception during the first decades of the early music revival. While the harpsichord itself was widely seen as obsolete by the turn of the 19th century, the idea of the harpsichord appears to have persisted in the collective cultural memory long after most of its physical artifacts were destroyed or relegated to museums. Indeed, an overview of literary references to the instrument from the late 19th- and early-20th centuries reveals that the instrument did in fact maintain a rich afterlife as a potent literary symbol in the writings of the time.  

By surveying texts by Thomas Hardy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Robert Browning, among others, this paper endeavors to explore the harpsichord’s literary heritage during the time when it was no longer a commonly used instrument.  The harpsichord, it will be argued, became a relatively conventional literary device with a common network of associations with which it was often connected.  These associations made the instrument a valuable and evocative literary emblem of a neglected musical past.  Silent, the harpsichord represented music no longer heard; but when played, it frequently evoked images of the supernatural, often even the spectral appearances of long-dead composers and performers.

The association between the instrument and the supernatural, it will be argued, played a role in the revival of the instruments by early music pioneers such as Arnold Dolmetsch, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, and Wanda Landowska, as well as in the design of the modern harpsichord used by this new generation of performers.  Finally, this paper will conclude by exploring the connections between the aforementioned literary conventions and 20th-century journalistic accounts of the newly revived instrument.   

 

"Who's Playing the Player Piano—and Can the Talking Machine Sing?:
Shifting Perceptions of Musical Agency in Mechanical Instrument, 1890-1910 "

(Presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Musical Instrument Society in New Haven, Connecticut.)

Abstract: From a modern perspective, devices that mechanically play music—whether from perforated roll, grooved disc, or other recorded media—are commonly perceived as being automatic machines that merely reproduce a musical performance which was previously created. In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, however, the question of exactly where musical agency should be attributed with these devices was far more complex. Early mechanical instruments frequently provided substantial control of the artistic aspects of musical performance, allowing their operators to identify themselves as the true "players" of the music in spite of significant mechanical assistance. Likewise, a parallel situation can be found in the perception of the fledgling phonograph, at this time a direct competitor to mechanical instruments in the realm of domestic music making. Indeed, despite being only able to play previously recorded material, the phonograph was frequently discussed and advertised in terms that transcended the boundaries of acoustic reproduction and identified it as a musical instrument in its own right, an identification only reinforced by the morphological likeness of the phonograph horn to those found on conventional wind instruments. Through an exploration of contemporary views as found in personal accounts, essays, periodicals, and advertisement, this paper will investigate how these musical devices evolved not only technologically but also conceptually in the first decades of their existence.