Having received my Ph.D. in Music Theory from Yale University in 2009, I am currently a tenured Associate Professor of Music Theory and Cognition at Northwestern University, where I have taught since 2010, after spending a year at the Jacobs School of Music of Indiana University (Bloomington) as Post-Doctoral Resident Scholar. I research the compositional, listening, and pedagogical practices of the long 18th century, with an emphasis on the music of Beethoven, J. S. Bach, and Mozart, using a holistic methodology that combines perspectives from schema theory, Formenlehre, topic theory, and historical pedagogies, in order to reconstruct “insider” perspectives on music of the period, through microtheoretic and microhistorical means. My work is concerned with
1) historical modes of listening oriented around key perception/tonality, the interactions between local and large-scale musical grammars, and intersections between syntax and semantics; 2) musical meaning and communication in Mozart and (Late) Beethoven; and 3) how partimenti and other historical pedagogies relate to free composition in Germanophone Europe, as well as the competing aesthetic underpinnings of various 18th-century pedagogies. I have published or have work forthcoming in Music Analysis, Music Theory Online, Eighteenth-Century Music, BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Intégral, Musica Humana, Theory and Practice, The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (ed. Danuta Mirka), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies (ed. Daniel Shanahan, Ashley Burgoyne, and Ian Quinn), What Is a Cadence? (ed. Markus Neuwirth and Pieter Bergé), and The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony (ed. Nancy November). I have presented papers at numerous national, international, and regional conferences in North America and Europe, and have been invited to present research at institutions in the United States and Europe.

            I am currently writing a monograph titled Musical Creativity in the Historical Imagination, which aims to be the first ever technical, aesthetic, and philosophical manifesto on period composition, one that tells its story through the lens of my own historical compositions. Early fruits of this labor are published in “Prelude on a Partimento: Invention in the Compositional Pedagogy of the German States in the Time of J. S. Bach” (Music Theory Online), which received the Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2017. Also in 2017, I was awarded the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship, Northwestern University’s highest recognition of teaching excellence and curricular innovation. The curriculum I designed and taught from 2013–19 was oriented around 18th-century period composition, and in several respects was the lab where many ideas for the book project were developed.