My research focuses on the intersections between music, aesthetics, science, and technology. I concentrate primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but my work also takes me into the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. I am especially intrigued by questions of instrumentality and mediation. By “instrumentality” I imply musical instruments and their complex material histories, as well as the diverse ways in which instruments are used in musical practices. My first book The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge University Press, 2013) explored the origins of modern orchestration and the ways in which the orchestra, as a musical body and institution, both regulated the production of musical works and altered, in radical ways, the prevailing discourse about music. My second book, Instruments and Order, delves into the changing conceptions and uses of musical instruments from beginnings of modern musical historiography in the eighteenth century to the birth of the modern discipline of organology. It examines how we use instruments to reconstitute music’s past, the complex relationships between instruments and time, including the ways in which some forms of technology demand a transhistorical approach, and the history of instrumental innovation and invention.

Books

2013 The Orchestral Revolution: Joseph Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre, Cambridge University Press, 2013

In progress Instruments and Order

Editorial Projects

Co-editor (with Alexander Rehding): The Oxford Handbook of Timbre: forthcoming (in print and online) 

2018    Guest Editor, “Vocal Organologies & Philologies,” Opera QuarterlyVol. 33, nos. 3-4 (Summer-Autumn 2017) contributors: Amy Cimini, Nina Eidsheim, Emma Dillon, Clara Latham; review by Etha Williams

Articles

2019    with Thomas Patteson, “Ethereal Timbres and the Sounds of the Ineffable” in Oxford Musical Handbooks Online

2015    “Musicology in the Garden” in the colloquy “Quirk Historicism,” Representations 132 (Fall), 88-94

2013    with John Tresch, “Toward a New Organology,” in Myles Jackson, Alexandra Hui, and Julia Kursell, ed.,Music, Sound, and the Laboratory during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,Osiris28: 278-298

2012  “Toward a Musicology of Interfaces,” Keyboard Perspectives V: 1-13

2011    with John Tresch “A Sublime Invasion: Meyerbeer, Balzac, and the Opera Machine,” Opera Quarterly27/1, 4-31

2010    “Haydn, Hoffmann, and the Opera of Instruments,”Studia Musicologica 51/3-4; 325-346

2010    “The Work of the Orchestra in Haydn’s Creation,” 19th-Century Music34/1; 3-38

2010    “‘…This Little Ukulele Tells the Truth’: Indie Pop and Kitsch Authenticity,” Popular Music29/3; 457-469

2008    “E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Ethereal Technologies of ‘Nature Music,’” Eighteenth-Century Music Vol. 5/1; 7-25

2003    “The Origins of the Orchestra Machine,” Current Musicology 76; 9-25

Book Chapters

2019    with Matthew Head, “Haydn and Ideas; Or, The Idea of Haydn,” essay for the Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia, ed. Caryl Clark and Sarah Day O’Connell

2017    “Music as an Object of Natural History,” in James Q. Davies, Ellen Lockhart, ed., Sound Knowledge(Peer Reviewed; University of Chicago Press,), 27-46. 

2015    “Mozart, Song and the Pre-Uncanny,” Mozart Studies II, edited by Simon Keefe (Cambridge University Press), 229-248. (Peer reviewed)

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, 2009-2010 

Penn Humanities Forum Faculty Fellow, 2008-2009

Donald J. Grout Dissertation Prize, 2007

Alvin H. Johnson AMS-50 Dissertation Fellowship, 2005

American Musicological Society

American Musical Instrument Society