I have two complementary areas of research:

  • mid sixteenth-century music (ca. 1520–1550), above all the music of Adrian Willaert (d. 1562)
  • the historiography of early music during the twentieth century in Germany and the United States.

Sixteenth-century music

I’m the founder and developer of The 1520s Project, an open-source repository of music from the early sixteenth century. The project aims to address how, when, and where a radically new style of polyphonic music emerged in ca. 1520. The project currently features 250 scores, or roughly 250,000 notes.

I’m currently editing a volume for the Adrian Willaert collected-works edition with the American Institute of Musicology of motets that appeared up to the year 1534 in printed anthologies and manuscripts.

Music historiography

In 2023 I’m developing a database of concert programs of early music from ca. 1915–1960. This research is being generously supported by the Ora Frishberg Saloman Fund of the American Musicological Society.

I’m also working on a project on the music publisher Armen Carapetyan (1908–1992), founder of the American Institute of Musicology. Over the past few years, I’ve compiled a catalogue of over 900 letters to and from Carapetyan. See some analysis of the catalogue.

Dissertation

My dissertation is embargoed until June 2024, at which point it will be accessible through Stanford Libraries and ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Global. But I’d be happy to share:

  • You can download my dissertation here (391 pp., 12.6 MB). Ask me for the uncompressed version.
  • I’ve compiled a list of errata. Let me know if you notice other typographical or substantive errors, and I’ll credit you here.

Dissertation abstract

This dissertation takes as its point of departure a problematic historiographical tradition. Even while recognizing that the death of the famous composer Josquin des Prez (1450–1521) marked a stylistic turning point, scholars working in Germany in the early twentieth century characterized the decades that followed, ca. 1520–50, as an aesthetic retrenchment, overstating Josquin’s influence and unwittingly lumping into the same generation sixteenth-century musicians who in fact worked at different times and in different stylistic idioms.

Relying on research in approximately thirty archives, this study reveals how a problematic narrative arose owing to nationalism, religious politics, interpersonal politics, the state of the field at the time, and the inaccessibility of primary source materials. The dissertation revisits composer biographies and the datings of central musical sources. And it uses comparative stylistic analyses of sacred polyphony to pinpoint how, when, and where a new style emerged ca. 1520. Placing writings that launched the modern historiographical tradition in dialogue with musical repertories central to the early history of musicology, the dissertation aims to give appropriate weight to a decisive shift in the history of music while also revealing the enduring influence of early German scholarship on the discipline as a whole.