An Invitation to Atonal Music:
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cluster Chords (lecture at Arizona Senior Academy)

My scholarly work explores the instability of categories that musicians often take for granted: pitch identity, rhythmic structure, musical form, notation, and even the conceptual foundations of music theory. My research draws on analytical, historical, and philosophical approaches, with particular attention to the ways musical practices both depend upon and unsettle the distinctions we use to describe them.

Selected Writings

"More than Moshing: Structure, Convention, and Innovation in Extreme Metal Breakdowns." In The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition (2025).
"Rhythmic Processes in Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire." Music Analysis 40/i (2021): 3–39.
"A Tendency-Transformational Model of Enharmonic Modulations and Related Phenomena." Music Theory Spectrum 41/1 (Spring 2019).
"What's Notation Got to Do with It? Enharmonic Modulations Reconsidered." Indiana Theory Review 35 (2018): 117–160. click to download
"Transformation at the Margins of Tonality: Scriabin's Piano Sonata, Op. 64." Music Theory and Analysis 5.1 (2018): 1–28.  click to download