I am a music theorist with a deep interest in history. I study what is lost in translation across media, borders, and times, and what makes musical genres, classical and popular, seem repeatable for a while: the tools and theories musical communities try to rescue from inevitable change.
My book project, Generic Outliers: Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide, examines how an underground genre of music tried to reconcile the pursuit of escalation with inherited traditions. My research on metal music has appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition, and Analyzing Black Metal. My work on classical music includes an article on chromatic harmony in Mozart in the Indiana Theory Review and twelve (German) dictionary articles in Das Lexikon des Orchesters. I regularly present at national and international conferences.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at West Virginia University. Before joining WVU, I taught at the University of Chicago, where I earned my Ph.D. in Music History and Theory in 2023. As a teacher and mentor, I approach music theory as a practice of translating between sound, interfaces, and cultures. I am committed to preparing my students for a changing future, and I believe that musical and technological literacy matter more than ever in the age of machine learning.
Research
Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide: Music, Technology, Genre
Book project
This project analyzes how heavy metal radicalized into different “extreme” subgenres in response 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.
My most 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 logics of expertise in hip-hop and metal music.
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 am currently working on an article on form and non-linear temporality in the symphonies of Anton Bruckner.
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.