Overview
I work at the intersection of musicology and the histories of music theory and science. Most of my published research thus far has focused on the interrelations of music, mind, and body during the emergence of modern European musical cultures; my current work extends these questions back to the medieval period and up to the present, with a focus on the interplay between understandings of the cognition of music and contemporaneous philosophical and psychological theories.
My recent book, Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment, (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the life and music-theoretical writings of the Glasgow-based merchant potter John Holden (1729–1772). Holden was the earliest musical thinker to provide an explicit psychological account of how our minds perceive music, or, as he put it, an explanation for why “the ear chooses and refuses” musical sounds. His was a radically new account of musical perception: a phenomenological explanation of tonality as a product of the collaborative effort of the mind’s faculties that is still relevant today. The book then turns to Walter Young (1744–1814), whose adaptation of Holden’s method to rhythm reflects the Scottish Enlightenment’s approach to the problems of universalism and relativism, and Young’s sister, Anne Gunn (1756–1811), who likewise developed Holden’s ideas in her Musical Games (1801), a complex set of games designed to teach children the rudiments of music theory.
My current book project, Unconscious Music: Habit, Possession, and other Automaticities, investigates the well-known but little discussed fact that the activity of performance requires that musicians not attend to their own actions. Other research interests include historical theories of attentive listening, a topic I explore together with Francesca Brittan in an edited collection entitled The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity (forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press), and the history of music theory in a global perspective, the subject of a major anthology I am co-curating together with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, entitled Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, (forthcoming with the University of Chicago's Online Press Service, CORPUS).
Before coming to Cornell, I spent three years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Columbia Society of Fellows, followed by six years as the Leader of the Research Group “Histories of Music, Mind, and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. My research has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Baden-Württemberg Landesstiftung, the Max Planck Gesellschaft, and the University of Chicago Neubauer Collegium. Recent prizes include a 2024 emerging scholar award (article) from the Society for Music Theory, the 2025 Society for Music Theory's Diversity Syllabus award, and the 2025 Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music from the North American British Music Studies Association.
In my early twenties, I was concertmaster of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and a member of the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, touring under the batons of Boulez, Barenboim and Abbado. I also enjoyed improvising, and collaborated with Jason Lindner, Omer Avital, Eran Zur, Victoria Hanna, and Yoyo Ma's Silk Road Project among others, at festivals including the Winter Jazz Fest, the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, and the BRIC Jazz Festival. Various aspects of these experiences inspired my academic path and continue to inform my research interests.
Research Focus
- History of music cognition
- Attention / distraction
- Music and habit
- Music and medicine
- Global histories of music theory
Publications
Books
- Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment. Oxford University Press, 2025. 296 pp. Open Access.
- with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, eds. Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory. Under contract, University of Chicago OPS. Open Access.
- with Felix Wörner and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, eds. Lexikon Schriften über Musik III: Musikästhetik in globaler Perspektive. Under contract, Bärenreiter Verlag.
- with Francesca Brittan, eds. The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, 1800-1930. Forthcoming, the University of Pennsylvania Press. Open Access.
- with James Grande, eds. Sound and Sense in British Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 2023. Open Access.
- 2025 Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music, NABMSA
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- with David E. Cohen, “Exertion, Expectation, Synthesis: Aspects of Aural Perception in Descartes’s Compendium musicae.” Journal of Music Theory 69.2 (2025): 241–61.
- “Hector Berlioz’s Neurophysiological Imagination.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 75.1 (2022), 1–37.
- “‘To ‘Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind’: Listening with Attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland.” Music Theory Spectrum 44.1 (2022): 141–54.
- Society for Music Theory emerging scholar award, 2024
- “Séances, ‘Sperrits,’ and Self-Playing Accordions: Musical Instruments in Victorian Spiritualism.” Journal of Musicology 38.2 (2021), 230–59.
- “The Kinetic Universe of Philippe Leroux’s De La Texture (2007): Drum Rudiments, Waveform Profiles, and Process Polyphony.” Music Theory & Analysis 8.2 (2021), 327–340.
- “How the Sheng became a Harp.” Journal of Sound Studies 6.2 (2020): 239–56.
- “Talking to the Hand: The ‘Hysterical Epistemology’ of the Migrating Sensorium.” In colloquy, “Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72.2 (2019), 552–557.
- “An Eighteenth-Century Theory of Musical Cognition? John Holden’s Essay towards a Rational System of Music (1770).” Journal of Music Theory 62.2, October (2018): 205–48.
- Finalist, Society for Music Theory emerging scholar award, 2019
- “Anne Young’s Introduction to Music (1803): Pedagogical, Speculative, and Ludic Music Theory.” SMT-V 4.3 (2018).
- “Anne Young’s Musical Games (1801): Music Theory, Gender, and Game Design.” SMT-V 4.2 (2018).
- “Music, Theater, and the Moral Treatment: The Case Dei Matti of Aversa and Palermo.” Special issue, “Italian Music & the Medical Sciences,” Laboratoire italien 20.2 (2017).
- “‘The Expressive Organ Within Us’: Ether, Ethereality, and Early Romantic Ideas about Music and the Nerves.” 19th-Century Music 38.2 (2014): 115–44.
- “The Lost Movements of Ernst Toch’s ‘Gesprochene Musik.’” Current Musicology 97 (2014): 37–59.
- “From Trinidad to Cyberspace: Reconsidering Toch’s Geographical Fugue.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 9.2 (2012): 227–43.
- “Wagnerpunk: A Steampunk Reading of Patrice Chéreau’s Staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen (1976).” Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies 4.2 (2011): 91–107.
Book Chapters
- with David E. Cohen and Nori Jacoby, “Consonant / Contingent: Five Case Studies on Musical-Cultural Diversity.” In Neurosciences of Music: Interdisciplinary Insights, ed. Jessica Grahn & Jonathan de Souza. Forthcoming, Oxford University Press.
- “At Adama: A Musical Vignette.” In Classical and Popular Music in Israel: Transcultural Dialogues and Contrasts, ed. Malcolm Miller. University of Rochester Press, 2025, 331–50.
- “‘Ossianic Sounds’: Berlioz on Memory.” In Berlioz and His World, ed. Francesca Brittan and Sarah Hibberd. Chicago University Press, 2024, 49–70.
- “Of Sound Minds and Tuning Forks: Neuroscience’s Vibratory Histories.” In The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, ed. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Psyche Loui, & Deirdre Loughridge. MIT Press, 2023, 115–129. [Featured on The MIT Press Reader, June 2023]
- With James Grande, “Introduction.” In Sound and Sense in British Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
- “Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry.” In Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, ed. David Trippett & Benjamin Walton. Cambridge University Press, 2019, 63–83.
- with Stanley Finger, “Musical Glasses, Metal Reeds, and Broken Hearts: Two Cases of Melancholia Treated by New Musical Instruments.” In The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Wellbeing: Historical and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Penelope Gouk, Jacomien Prins, Wiebke Thormaehlen, & James Kennaway. Routledge, 2018, 77–92.
- “Tafillalt’s ‘Soulmate’ and the Israeli Piyyut Revival.” In Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas: Musical Exodus, ed. Ruth F. Davis. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, 165–80.
Special Issues
- with Caleb Mutch and David E. Cohen, eds. Special section on the pre-history of music cognition, Journal of Music Theory 69.2 (Fall 2025), 207–284.
- with Francesca Brittan, eds. Colloquy on “Attention, Anxiety, and Audition's Histories,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72.2 (2019), 541–80.
Introductions
- with Francesca Brittan, “Sound Attentions.” In The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, 1800–1930. In production, the University of Pennsylvania Press.
- with Caleb Mutch and David E. Cohen, “Towards a Pre-History of Music Cognition.” Introduction to special section on the prehistory of music cognition. Journal of Music Theory 69.2 (2025): 207–11.
- with James Grande, “Introduction.” In Sound and Sense in British Romanticism. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism Series, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
- with Francesca Brittan, Introduction to colloquy on “Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72.2 (2019): 541–46.
Reviews
- “Deirdre Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism.” Music & Letters 99.1 (2018): 126–28.
- “Music and the Nerves: 1700–1900, ed. James Kennaway.” Social History of Medicine 29.3 (2016): 638–39.
- “Ossian’s Folk Psychology,” by John Savarese [English Literary History 80.3].” Journal of Literature and Science 7.2 (2014): 90–91.
- “Cute Boy, Charming Girl: Children’s Songs of the Modern Hebrew Nation (1882–1948).” Asian Music 45.2 (2014): 132–33.
Encyclopedia Entries
- Entries in New Grove / Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press
- “Walter Young,” 2025
https://doi.org/10.1093/omo/9781561592630.013.90000382187 - “John Holden,” 2025
https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.13200 - “Anne Gunn,” (with Brianna Robertson-Kirkland), 2025
https://doi.org/10.1093/omo/9781561592630.013.90000382229
- “Walter Young,” 2025
- Entries in Thinking Music, ed, Thomas Christensen, Lester Hu, & Carmel Raz
- “Anne Young’s Musical Games (1801)”
- “John Holden’s Essay towards a Rational System of Music (1770)”
- Entries in Lexikon der musikalischen Schriften II, ed. Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann & Felix Wörner. Bärenreiter Verlag, 2022.
- “John Holden, ‘Essay towards a Rational System of Music,’” pp. 388–390.
- “James Beattie, ‘On Poetry & Music, As They Affect the Mind,’” pp. 92–94.
- “Christian Conrad Moritz, ‘Die Wirkungen der äußern Sinne in psychologischer Rücksicht: Über das musikalische Gehör’” (with David E. Cohen), pp. 605–607.
Public Writing
- “The Hidden History of Women Game Designers.” JStor Daily, November 2025
- “Music of the Squares: David Ramsay Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics.” Public Domain Review, May 16, 2019.
- “Going Global, in Theory.” (with David E. Cohen, Roger M. Grant, Andrew Hicks, Nathan J. Martin, Caleb Mutch, Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, Felix Wörner, and Anna Zayaruznaya). IMS Blog: Musicological Brainfood 3.1 (2019).
- “Of Sound Minds and Tuning Forks: Charcot’s Acoustic Experiments at the Salpêtrière.” Musicology Now, October 2015.
