Overview
I am a scholar, performer, artistic researcher, and program director whose work explores how instruments, interfaces, and media shape musical thought and cultural experience. As Director of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity and the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, I bring the study of music into dialogue with media studies, technology, and the public humanities. Across my scholarship and creative practice, I investigate how keyboards, from eighteenth-century fortepianos to synthesizers and digital controllers, mediate relationships among touch, memory, play, sound, and imagination.
Research Focus
My research explores how music becomes playable, transmissible, and memorable through cultural techniques involving notation, instruments, bodies, and interfaces. My first book, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo, focused on how keyboards have made music playable, while my current book project, Resonant Artifacts: The Romantic Piano and the Forging of Musical Memory, asks how pianos have made music memorable.
Resonant Artifacts treats the Romantic piano as a medium through which musical memory is forged rather than preserved. It argues that while notation, adaptation, performance, pedagogy, instruments, and recordings promise to make music present again, they do so by producing artifacts: aliases, echoes, distortions, fragments, gestures, and inflections through which the past is remade in/as the present. The book takes shape around Schubert, Chopin, Johanna Kinkel, Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fictional composer Johannes Kreisler, treating them as points of convergence within a wider ecology of mediation that incorporates composition, performance, editing, teaching, arrangement, instrument design, criticism, recording, and recollection.
Methodologically, Resonant Artifacts brings historical musicology into contact with media archaeology, historical performance, sound studies, and artistic research. It grows out of my work with both the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards and the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity: the former provides a collection of historical instruments through which questions of touch, resonance, and musical memory can be tested in practice, while the latter fosters interdisciplinary reflection on relationships among technologies, media, and humanistic inquiry.
My first book, Keys to Play, traces a genealogy of musical digitality at the keyboard under the rubrics of improvisation, performance, and recreation. Published under a Creative Commons license by the University of California Press, it received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award in 2017 and is available as a free download in a variety of formats here.
My other publications include essays on nineteenth-century musical performance, eighteenth-century improvisation, Brahms and E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mozart, Guitar Hero, media archaeology and historically informed performance, and audiovisual correspondences in digital games.
Performance and Artistic Research
At the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, performance is inseparable from research and teaching. The Center's instruments serve not only as vehicles for repertory, but as media through which questions of touch, resonance, technique, notation, listening, technology, and historical imagination can be explored through practice.
As a keyboardist and artistic researcher, I perform on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century original and replica instruments as well as electric pianos, synthesizers, and digital controllers. Recent initiatives include Keyboard Energies, a CCHK initiative exploring keyboards as participants in systems of energy, technology, experimentation, and sustainability, and CLAVIS (the Collective Laboratory for Acoustic and Voltaic Interface Studies), an experimental keyboard collective that places historical, electro-mechanical, electronic, and digital instruments into dialogue.
Performances during 2026 include "Keyboard Energies: Alternating Currents" at Cornell Tech in New York City; Mozart’s Concerto for Three Keyboards, K. 242, with Patricia García Gil and Federico Ercoli at the Historical Keyboard Society of North America conference in Florence; my Variations on a Fictional Theme, inspired by the CCHK’s 1824 Graf piano and performed at Cornell, the Eastman School of Music, and the Catskill Mountain Foundation; and my sonata for historical piano(s) and violin, performed in NYC with my Cornell colleague Ariana Kim. I also appear regularly in the CCHK Salon Project series and as co-director of the Chamber Music Collective, an intensive summer program for advanced students using eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments and techniques.
Teaching
I teach undergraduate courses in music history, culture, theory, materials, techniques, performance, media, and play. Recent courses include Music and Digital Gameplay, Introduction to Western Art Music, Synthesizing Pop: Electronics and the Musical Imagination with Judith Peraino, and Thinking Media, an interdisciplinary course featuring guest faculty from across the university.
My current teaching also reflects my role as Director of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity, where I work with students and faculty across Cornell to explore how technological systems shape human experience, imagination, and cultural practice. I advise student projects involving AI, games, media, design, sound, music technology, cultural memory, and the public humanities.
My graduate seminars have focused on ludomusicology, 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 Prof. Nick Salvato from the Department of Performing and Media Arts.
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, 19th-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.