Overview
As director of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, as a scholar, and as a performer, I focus on intersections and overlaps between keyboard music, digital games, and the diverse ways both can be played. Through my research and teaching, I am committed to bringing thought and practice together by reflecting on the mechanics, dynamics, and consequences of musical acts. In particular, I investigate how the concept of play can sharpen our awareness of music’s joys and risks while addressing the underlying question of how materials, processes, interfaces, and media make both music and play conceivable as such.
Research Focus
I am currently working on my second book, Romantic Artifacts: Instruments of Musical Disclosure, 1799-1857. The book examines Beethovenian improvisation, Schubert‘s lieder, Chopin‘s piano music, and Brahms‘s concertos through the prisms of five instruments in the collection of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards: a 1799 Broadwood, an 1823 Graf, an 1843 Pleyel, an 1857 Streicher, and an 1878 aliquot-strung Blüthner. Informed by theories of materiality, (inter)mediality, and systemic organization, Romantic Artifacts places these instruments at the center of historical and contemporary debates concerning the nature of aesthetic experience and the means of its realization.
Romantic Artifacts departs from the premise that all attempts to make sense of music are liable to induce the perception of the properties that they purport to identify and interpret. In this context, “artifact” has a double meaning: it can refer both to a human-made object of high cultural value and to the distortions that emerge via the technological means by which such phenomena are made observable. Throughout the book, parallactic shifts between media-archaeological perspectives set its artifactual objects of study in relief. On the one hand, its presentist methods illuminate neglected facets of historical phenomena; on the other, these phenomena expose the genealogy of the present, recursively revealing media archaeology itself to exhibit the artifactual properties of Romantic sensibilities.
My first book, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo, asks how keyboards have made music playable and responds by tracing a genealogy of musical digitality under the rubrics of improvisation, performance, and recreation. The book consists of five Keys, arrayed in a 2+3 configuration akin to the black keys on a piano; in turn, each Key contains five mini-Keys that contain case studies and cameos juxtaposing figures such as Mozart and Super Mario. The keyboard thus forms a field of play on which ostensibly disparate objects of inquiry—including clavichords, dice games, typewriters, and the Nintendo Entertainment System—can enter into a range of analogical relations.
Described by readers as “wonderfully allusive and erudite,” “a virtuosic boss run,” and “an exquisite love letter to the vitality of interdisciplinary play,” Keys to Play received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, which recognizes a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar beyond the early stages of his or her career. The book was published under a Creative Commons license by the University of California Press and contains music by Mozart, Beethoven, Bizet, Louis Couperin, and others recorded by me alongside my Cornell colleagues Malcolm Bilson, Ariana Kim, Shin Hwang, and Matthew Hall. Keys to Play is available as a free download in a variety of formats here.
My other publications include essays on musical performance in the nineteenth century and improvisation in the eighteenth century, Mozart, Guitar Hero, media archaeology in relation to historically informed performance, and audiovisual correspondences in the context of digital games. I am also editor of Keyboard Perspectives, the journal of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. The editorial team is always pleased to consider articles for publication in the journal.
Performance
As a (forte)pianist, I am a faculty member of the Chamber Music Collective, which runs an intensive summer chamber music program for advanced students using eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments and techniques. Recent performances include songs by Chao Yuen-Ren, Schubert, and Liszt with tenor Stephen Ng (1878 Blüthner), Schubert‘s “Erlkönig” with Cornell and CMC colleague Jean Bernard Cerin (1823 Graf); Mendelssohn‘s Piano Trio in C minor with CMC colleagues Lucy Russell and Keiran Campbell (1843 Pleyel); sonatas for fortepiano and violin by Mozart and Beethoven with festival co-director Ariana Kim at Paesaggi Musicali Toscani (1795 Walter replica); and the music of C. P. E. Bach, Rita Strohl, Katherine Heyman, Cécile Chaminade, Reynaldo Hahn, Debussy, Fauré, and Franck at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards‘ ongoing Salon Project.
My live performance of Mozart’s Keyboard Concerto in F, K. 459, on an 1800 Schantz replica with the Cornell Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Chris Younghoon Kim, can be viewed here. I devised my own cadenzas for the concerto, which features prominently in Keys to Play.
A recording of the 1854 version of Brahms‘s Piano Trio in B, op. 8, on an 1857 Streicher with violinist Rebecca Anderson and cellist John Haines-Eitzen is available here. On a related note, my article “Reforming Johannes: Brahms, Kreisler, and the Piano Trio in B, op. 8,” which considers the earlier and later versions of the piece and their relation to each other, won the Royal Musical Association’s Jerome Roche prize in 2008.
Teaching
I teach undergraduate courses in music history, culture, theory, materials, techniques, and performance. My most popular course is Music and Digital Gameplay, which I offer as often as possible: it will be taught as an asynchronous online course in Winter 2024–25. Other courses I have recently taught include Introduction to Western Art Music and Synthesizing Pop: Electronics and the Musical Imagination (with Judith Peraino). In Spring 2025 I will teach Thinking Media, an interdisciplinary course featuring guest faculty from across the university. I also serve as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Media Studies minor.
My graduate seminars have focused on ludomusicology (the study of music, games, and play, a scholarly field that my work helped establish), historical keyboard cultures and techniques, nineteenth-century music and its technological mediation, improvisation, virtuosity, performance practice, and the music of Schubert. Beyond the Department of Music, I have co-taught the interdisciplinary seminar Thinking Media Studies (with Nick Salvato).
I have worked closely with graduate students on dissertations and publications on topics ranging from embodiment in nineteenth-century keyboard music, technologies of musical stenography, representations of the devil on the Parisian stage, and Czerny‘s transcriptions of Beethoven to Yamaha’s Vocaloid Keyboard. Articles that originated as papers written by graduate students in my seminars have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Nineteenth-Century Music, and Keyboard Perspectives.
Awards and Honors
- 2023–24: Received Individual Innovation Award by Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation for “Forging Connections: Building and Cataloging a World of Games at Cornell,” a project in which the CIVIC Media Fellows collaborate with the University Library to assemble and document a collection of games and related materials via course assignments.
- 2022–24 and 2018–20: Appointed as a Media Studies Fellow by CIVIC, the Provost’s Task Force for the Humanities and Arts in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences.
- 2017: My monograph Keys to Play received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, which recognizes “a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar beyond the early stages of his or her career.”
- 2017: Awarded Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists by Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, which “recognizes faculty excellence [by giving] recipients a semester’s sabbatical leave at full salary to write, develop new courses, conduct research or otherwise enrich their teaching and scholarship.”
- 2008: Awarded the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association “for a distinguished article by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career.”
Publications
Monograph
- Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
Refereed Journal Articles
- “Chopin’s Aliases.” Nineteenth-Century Music 42, no. 1 (2018): 3–29.
- “Rehear(s)ing Media Archaeology.” Contribution to “Discrete/Continuous: Music and Media Theory after Kittler” (Colloquy convened by Alexander Rehding), Journal of the American Musicological Society 70, no. 1 (2017): 245–51.
- “The Qualities of Quantities: ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo.’” Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 2 (2016): 137–40.
- “Digital Analogies: The Keyboard as Field of Musical Play.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68, no. 1 (2015): 151–227.
- “Entextualization and the Improvised Past.” Music Theory Online 19, no. 2 (2013).
- “Mozart’s Harlequinade: Improvising Music alla commedia dell’arte.” Common Knowledge 17, no. 2 (2011): 335–47.
- “Reforming Johannes: Brahms, Kreisler, and the Piano Trio in B, op. 8.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 132, no. 2 (2007): 252–305.
Commissioned Book Chapters and Articles
- “Performance.” In A Cultural History of Music: The Age of Industry, edited by Alexander Rehding and Naomi Waltham-Smith, 149–71. New York: Bloomsbury, 2023.
- “Roundtable: Current Perspectives on Music, Sound, and Narrative in Screen Media,” co-authored with Anahid Kassabian, Claudia Gorbman, et al. In The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, edited by Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Benjamin Winters, 108–24. New York: Routledge, 2017.
- “Nintendo’s Art of Musical Play,” co-authored with Aya Saiki. In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K. J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 51–76. New York: Routledge, 2014.
- “Playing Games With Music (and Vice Versa): Ludomusicological Perspectives on Guitar Hero and Rock Band.” In Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance, edited by Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill, 279–318. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
- “Music, Visual Culture, and Digital Games.” In The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, edited by Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard, 376–84. New York: Routledge, 2013.
- “Presenting the Past: The Experience of Historically Inspired Keyboard Improvisation.” Keyboard Perspectives 2 (2009): 83–102. (Recording of solo improvisation included on accompanying CD.)
- “Between Work and Play: Brahms as Performer of His Own Music.” In Johannes Brahms and His World, edited by Kevin C. Karnes and Walter Frisch, 137–65. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
- “Is There More than Juan Brahms?” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131, no. 1 (2006): 160–75.
In the news
- Nintendo music app ‘rivals major record labels,’ not just for gamers
- Cornell crafts multifaceted game studies program
- Forte/Piano Summer Academy returns to Cornell
- Building and cataloging a world of games at Cornell
- Campus center holds the ‘keys’ to musical history
- Media Studies Initiative launches new graduate minor
- Cornell celebrates electronic music pioneer Robert Moog
- New Cornell hub for historical keyboards opened Sept. 6
- New class contemplates media from cross-campus perspectives
- Cornell Music announces Mayfest Chamber Music Festival
- Music announces spring semester events
- Media studies launches new initiatives
- Mayfest to feature Chiaroscuro Quartet
- Moseley wins musicological book award
- Awards honor Cornell advisers, social scientists, humanists
- $2.7 million grant expands Arts & Sciences Active Learning Initiative
