In addition to my principle research focus, Messiaen's musical purposing of natural and supernatural phenomena, I have several other topics that interest me.

 

Ecomusicology

How do music and place inform one another? I teach a course called Music and Nature and am writing a book about how classical music has represented Appalachia. 

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I have published extensively on birdsong in the music of Messiaen, and have also published on how geology and topography may affect the composition and reception of music. 

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The Globalization of Classical Music

How has the Western classical tradition taken root and unfolded globally, particularly in places where it is not widely recognized as flourishing? I have taught a course examining the history of classical music in the United States, Turkey, and Japan.

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I am particularly interested in how tensions between tradition and modernity affect contemporary composers in Turkey.

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The State of Classical Music in the United States

I keep an eye on the marginalization of the classical tradition. I have a morbid fascination for the "death" of classical music and the ways it manages to stay alive, particularly from the perspective of the entire ecosystem of classical music production and reception, including patronage and program notes, fan zines and music blogs, playlists and remixes.

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The History of Contemporary Music 

I usually define my areas of expertise in terms of expanding concentric circles, from Messiaen to mid-20th-century music, to modernism and postmodernism, with favorite composers including Boulez, Ligeti, Norgard, Birtwistle, and Crumb. My attention gravitates toward France and the United States. I am particularly drawn toward contemporary opera, ecomusicology, and historiography.

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Folk and Popular Music 

My work on how composers have represented Appalachia has happily brought me deeply into the world of American folk and roots music. I have even been playing fiddle and viola with an old-time jam. I have taught folk and popular music from across the Americas, from Argentina to Columbia, and from Mexico to Canada.

 

I am a fan of much popular music, especially the Beatles and musicals from the 1920s and '30s. More broadly, I am developing an expertise in the development of popular music in America from about 1840 to 1970.

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Interdisciplinarity

Musicology today strikes me as inherently interdisciplinary; music study always implies "music and...." I retain a lifelong passion for poetry and drama that is fully congruent with the study of opera and song, and my published work is informed by fields and approaches such as art history, ornithology, theology, the history of philosophy, geology, humanistic geography, Cold War studies, class studies, ecocriticism, geocriticism, reception studies, race studies, and digital humanities. 

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Music Curricula and Music History Pedagogy

Having double-majored in English within a college of arts and sciences and in music theory/composition in a school of music, I have experienced wildly different approaches to education. These varying approaches are especially prominent between departments of music and schools of music or conservatories. I have taught in both settings and am concerned about the problems of curricula presented in both types of institution.

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And More

Other interests include the origins of the Beatles' sense of humor, music on the African-American stage, the introduction of ragtime into the music of Jerome Kern, the history of classical music in Pittsburgh, changing musical representations of nature, and anything Shakespearean.