I am a musicologist and music theorist who studies both popular and classical repertoire, with a focus on technology and mediation. Across my work, I probe how conceptual systems come under pressure from their outsides.
I use these cracks in vernacular and academic music theories as a lens to examine attachments, infrastructures, and histories. My book project, tentatively titled Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide, proposes that extreme metal’s conflicted attachment to technology makes it an exemplary case for understanding how genre, as a form of repetition, is marked by the memory of past media. I’ve also published on chromatic passages in Mozart that challenge canonical analytical technologies and lines of influence in black metal music.
Currently, I am a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Music and the College at the University of Chicago, where I earned my Ph.D. in 2023. I also hold an M.A. and B.A. from the University of Vienna and have college-equivalent training in graphic design and communications. Although this portfolio focuses on my research and teaching, it also includes creative work. In my free time, I enjoy resistance training, cooking, and meditation.
Research
Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide: Music, Technology, Genre
Book project
This project analyzes heavy metal’s radicalization into different “extreme” subgenres as aresponse to the analog-to-digital transition. Amid unequal access to digital studio technology, musicians had to reconcile conflicting values of tradition and escalation. I draw on archival materials, interviews, and artifacts to reconstruct the dialectic between what actors want technologies to be and what these tools could do. Rather than focusing on the outrageousness of this music and its relationship to mainstreams, I tell stories of how sonic intentions clash with economic and engineering challenges specific to the 1980s and 1990s.
More recent research examines how online platforms remix genre norms in the present. For example, in an analysis of cross-genre reaction videos, I demonstrate how algorithmic feedback loops between audiences and creators challenge the logic of expertise, masculinity, and belonging in hip-hop and metal.
Analytical Technologies and Their Limit Cases
Second research focus
Odds and Ends
Ideas and seeds for future research
I also research and teach on the interaction of theory, analysis, and history in Western art music. I am fascinated by cases where commitments to systematic consistency lead standard methods astray, especially in repertoire that should be their home territory. In a recent article on major third cycles in Mozart, I show how Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian approaches share a blind spot for mixed voice-leading patterns in these sequences. I have also begun a critique of recent formal analyses of Bruckner, which unduly privilege linear-associative logic over modular-combinatorial logic. In this line of inquiry, I draw on an insider-outsider perspective on North American music theory, which I first learned in Vienna.
Potential future avenues for my research beyond these two focal points lie in three long-standing passions of mine: exercise science, meditation, and the language and philosophical heritage of China. Thinking musicality as athletics, the study of distraction and self-mastery in digital ecologies, and an interest in Chinese extreme metal and appropriations of Daoism are at the back of my head and may, in time, take a front seat.