About
Music theorist who studies aural skills pedagogy, music theory pedagogy, and early music analysis. I’m particularly interested in reforming aural skills education to better serve a broader range of students. I teach at Utah State University, and previously taught as a lecturer at UMass Amherst and a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University. I also run a public-musicology blog on applying “traditional” music theory concepts to broadly-defined “popular” music, at
musictheorybridges.wordpress.com.
Education
Ph.D., music theory, Indiana University, 2013.
M.M., music theory, Indiana University, 2007.
B.A., music, Kenyon College, 2005. Publications
Pedagogy Publications
“
Reframing Aural Skills Instruction Based on Research in Working Memory.” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 32 (2018), 3–20.
“
Part Writing Can Be Student Centered.”
Engaging Students 8 (2018).
“
Incorporating Popular Music in Teaching: Ideas for the Non-Expert.”
Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 31 (2017), 3–17.
“
Bringing Jazz Repertoire, Improvisation, and Active Thinking into the Study of Motives.”
Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy 4 (2016).
“
Creativity in the College Music Classroom: Guidelines for Effective Integration.”
College Music Symposium 56 (2016).
“
Writing Across the Music Theory Curriculum” (co-authored with Dr. Sara Bakker).
Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy 2 (2014).
Early Music Publications
“
Order Within Disorder: What Kinds of Tonal Plans Exist in Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories?”
Early Music 46, No. 3 (2018), 465–482.
“Metrical Consonance, Metrical Dissonance, and Greater Metrical Dissonance in the Ars subtilior” (2016).
Form and Process in Music, 1300—2014: An Analytic Sampler, Jack Boss et al., eds. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 3–19.
Review of Woodley, Ronald (director), Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works.
Music Theory Online 21, No. 3 (2015).
“
Hearing Counterpoint Within Chromaticism: Analyzing Harmonic Relationships in Lassus’s Prophetiae Sibyllarum.”
Music Theory Online 18, No. 4 (2012).
Projects
In pedagogy, I have two intersecting current projects. On the one hand, I’m investigating how people identify chords as they’re listening to music–what they listen for, how they listen, what factors might contribute to success at this task, etc. On the other, I’m exploring curriculum reform based on the idea that aural skills should be founded on a concern for perception and cognition rather than music theory.
In early music, I’m currently exploring how musicians in the c. 1400 Ars subtilior used meter for expressive purposes. I use “expressive” here not just to mean “expressing” specific ideas (though that might be relevant), but rather in the general sense that music that conveys a sense of a “journey,” or perhaps tension and release, is often said to be “expressive.”
