I am a scholar of music theory whose work connects to fields as diverse as psychology, linguistics, and history while drawing on my own experience as a musical performer. I am interested in the mechanisms–both cultural and cognitive–through which music communicates meanings, and in the ways sound is used to structure information in both spoken language and in music.

This interest has taken me to various interrelated historical topics involving modernism from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. I am currently writing a study of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” as it evolved musically, textually, and conceptually between its first version in 1940 and the version that became widely known in the late 1950s. I have studied music composed in the years before World War I by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, drawing on early twentieth-century psychological ideas to explain how these highly influential modernist composers, often regarded as mathematical and unemotional, actually worked to make their music as directly expressive as possible. I have also investigated 19th-century music in relation to 19th-century handwriting and stenography, exploring ways in which sound was conceptualized before the phonograph. In a more purely theoretical vein, I have developed a way to apply Narmour’s Implication-Realization Model of musical melody to the intonation and prosody of spoken language.

I enjoy teaching at the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of liberal arts colleges. As a faculty member in the Music Department and an affiliate of the Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department of Pomona College, I teach courses in music theory as well as sound studies, music cognition, and linguistic elements of music.