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
Generic Outliers:
Extreme Metal Across
the Digital Divide
Book project
Generic Outliers: Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide examines how heavy metal developed a set of extreme subgenres from 1980 to 1995. While starting from shared assumptions, each subgenre developed a distinct notion of extremity. This differentiation resolved contradictions between extreme metal’s goals and values and the impediments and inequalities of the analog-to-digital transition. Extreme metal pursued ever-new quantifiable extremes, but its musicians justified these by appeals to traditional qualities of performance, production, and authorship. Extreme metal curates an archive of fanzines, films, and edited oral histories that preserves key debates, which I supplement with newly conducted interviews.
Related work has appeared in an article and a chapter:
"Capital Co-Opts the Blast Beat: Death Metal Drumming, Vernacular Theory, and the Labor Lost in the Analog-to-Digital Transition." Music Theory Spectrum, published online 2026.Music Theory Spectrum (2026). Death metal drummers theorized the blast beat as a test of physical labor and live performance. Digital drum replacement undermined those commitments, and the article reads that conflict through a Marxist distinction between concrete labor and abstract productivity. [Contact me for guest access]
"Imagining Future Extremes on the Record Player: Time Axis Manipulation as a Theory of Extreme Metal Creativity and History." In The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition (2025). Pioneers such as Hellhammer's Thomas Gabriel Fischer and Sadistik Exekution's Rok claimed they heard the blueprint for extreme metal on records played too fast or too slow. The chapter reads these stories as a vernacular theory that let musicians present innovation as the extension of metal tradition, and that shielded them from the shame of admitting adolescent emotion. [Accepted Manuscript]
My current research extends this work on the mediation of genre into the globalizing online present. In an analysis of cross-genre reaction videos, I show how social media algorithms hijack genre-specific displays of expert listening in hip-hop and metal, balancing vernacular analysis with the incentives of platform capitalism.
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. My current presentations on Anton Bruckner examines the subjectivity and temporality implicit in recent analyses of his symphonies, as well as the influence of vitalist Lebensphilosophie on early-twentieth-century studies of musical form.
"Voice-Leading, Register, and Contextualization in Three Major-Third Cycles by Mozart." Indiana Theory Review, vol. 39, Spring 2024. In this 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. [Accepted Manuscript]
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.