PhD, Critical Studies & Experimental Practices in Music, University of California-San Diego;
MA, Music, University of California-San Diego;
BA, Music, Eastman School of Music/University of Rochester

As a musician I strive to balance the pleasures of making music with the rigors of thinking about it (or do I mean the pleasures of thinking about it and the rigors of making it?). The piano is my instrument but I enjoy many different kinds of music, especially because they can all lead to endless discoveries about the world and about one’s self. As an undergraduate I studied classical piano at the Eastman School of Music, in Vienna and in Budapest at the Liszt Academy. Later I studied philosophy and religion in graduate school, but returned to music to explore contemporary and avant-garde performance and composition for my PhD at the University of California.

Before joining the Lang College faculty in 2003, I taught at the University of South Carolina School of Music and then at Whitman College, a liberal arts college in Washington State. Both those teaching experiences positively shaped my approach to pedagogy and curriculum development at Lang. At South Carolina my students were mostly music majors in instrumental and vocal performance, while at Whitman I taught in the Core Curriculum, an overview of the great texts of Antiquity and Modernity for first-year students of widely-varied academic goals. My own undergraduate career took me from the narrow focus of a music conservatory curriculum to a broader liberal arts education at the University of Rochester while I still continued my studies and performing at Eastman. I'm a strong advocate for a well-rounded education that focuses on the arts as well as their place in the larger context of history and culture. That's why arriving at Lang College to teach in the "Arts in Context" program was exactly what I always wanted to do.

My scholarly work focuses on the cultural meanings of musical performance in relation to various social ideologies and forms of technology. One long-term project I've now completed explores the controversial politics and poetics of the Eurovision Song Contest, the largest and longest-running annual televised competition for popular music in the world. I'm currently completing a book on the image of the concert pianist in popular culture, titled "Dreams of Love: Representing the Romantic Pianist." One chapter explores how the piano keyboard and its "language of touch" provided a model for early communication technologies in the nineteenth century. Other chapters deal with the eroticized virtuoso-lover mythology established by Franz Liszt, how Robert Schumann's piano music functions melodramatically in films and literature, and why piano transcriptions are a queer form of musical reproduction. As soon as this book is finished I'll start practicing again!

Spring 2010 Courses

Previous Courses Taught

• Fundamentals in Western Music
  
• Arts in New York City
• Musical Borrowing
• History and Culture of Piano
• Music in Film
• Hearing Art, Seeing Music
  
• Queer Culture

• "Schumann's Melodramatic Afterlife," in Rethinking Schumann (Oxford University Press), forthcoming in 2010
• "Piano, Telegraph, Typewriter: Listening to the Language of Touch," in Media, Technology and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate Press), forthcoming in 2009
• Interview about the Eurovision Song Contest on "The Current" with host Anna Maria Tremonti, CBC Radio (12 March 2009), accessible at <http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200903/20090312.html>
• Co-editor of A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest (Ashgate Publishing), 2007
• “Give Them a Hand: Playback Pianists and the Crisis of Disembodiment,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, 2003
• “Transcription, Transgression, and the (Pro)Creative Urge,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (University of Illinois Press), 2002
• “Concerto con amore: ‘Relationship’ and the Soundtrack Piano Concerto,” in ECHO: An Online Journal (vol. 2, no. 1), 2000
• “Hollywood’s Embattled Icon” in Piano Roles: 300 Years of Life with the Piano (Yale University Press), 2000

Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

New York, NY  10011

Mon. & Weds 12-2p & by appointment

• Critical studies in music
• History and culture of the piano and the Romantic pianist
• Music, gender and sexuality
• Film music, music and media

• American Musicological Society

• 2003, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend
• 2000, AMS 50 Fellowship from the American Musicological Society
• 1999, German Chancellor Scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation