Overview
I study the interrelations of music, mind, and body during the emergence of modern European musical cultures. How did the field of music cognition develop from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century? How did Enlightenment neurophysiology influence Romantic music? Many insights yielded by experiments in psychology for us today were available in early musical writings that prioritized introspection as method. I draw out from these writings—especially those that may be dismissed as merely speculative, amateurish, or effusive—the paradigms that also produced the most respected psychological, physiological, and philosophical treatises of their day. My book, Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, sheds new light on the history of music perception by focusing on music theory in the Scottish Enlightenment.
My current book project, “Art does not deliberate”: Toward a History of Automaticity and Musical Performance, argues that, at least until the nineteenth century, musical performance was conceptualised as automatic and non-cognitive, and that this aspect of its history has been overshadowed by the Romantic view of musicians as inspired vessels for the conveyance of sublime—or devilish—experience. Surveying Medieval commentators, Renaissance heretics, Enlightenment physiologists and Romantic mesmerists (accompanied by ouds, kitharas, vielles, and keyboards), it demonstrates how the complex yet seemingly automatic behavior exhibited in musical performance has long provided thinkers a suggestive example by which to explore various conceptions of what it is to be human.
My 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, 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.
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.
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, June 2025. 296 pp.
- with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, eds. Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory. Under contract, University of Chicago OPS.
- 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. Under contract, the University of Pennsylvania Press.
- with James Grande, eds. Sound and Sense in British Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- with David E. Cohen, “Exertion, Expectation, Synthesis: Aspects of Aural Perception in Descartes’s Compendium musicae.” Forthcoming, Journal of Music Theory 69.2, Fall 2025.
- “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. [Winner, 2024 emerging scholar award, the Society for Music Theory].
- “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.
- “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.
- “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
- “At Adama: A Musical Vignette.” In Art Musics of Israel, ed. Malcolm Miller. Forthcoming, University of Rochester Press, 2025.
- “‘Ossianic Sounds’: Berlioz on Memory.” In Berlioz and His World, ed. Francesca Brittan and Sarah Hibberd. Chicago University Press, 2024.
- “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 issue on the pre-history of music cognition, forthcoming, Journal of Music Theory 69.2, Fall 2025.
- with Francesca Brittan, eds. Colloquy on “Attention, Anxiety, and Audition's Histories,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72.2 (2019), 541–80.
Other Writing
- with Caleb Mutch and David E. Cohen, “Towards a Pre-History of Music Cognition.” Introduction to special issue on the pre-history of music cognition, forthcoming, Journal of Music Theory 69.2, Fall 2025.
- Entries in Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press.
- “John Holden,” 2025 (in press).
- “Walter Young,” 2025 (in press).
- “Anne Gunn,” (co-authored with Brianna Robertson-Kirkland), 2025 (in press).
- 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.
- with Francesca Brittan, “Introduction.” In colloquy, “Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72.2 (2019), 541–46.
- “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.
- “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).
- Review, “Deirdre Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism.” Music & Letters 99.1 (2018): 126–28.
- Review, “Music and the Nerves: 1700–1900, ed. James Kennaway.” Social History of Medicine 29.3 (2016): 638–39.
- “Of Sound Minds and Tuning Forks: Charcot’s Acoustic Experiments at the Salpêtrière,” Musicology Now, October 2015.
- “Ossian’s Folk Psychology,” by John Savarese [English Literary History 80.3].” Journal of Literature and Science 7.2 (2014).
- Review, “Cute Boy, Charming Girl: Children’s Songs of the Modern Hebrew Nation (1882–1948).” Asian Music (2014), 45.2, 132–33.