My scholarship is motivated by my passion for making contemporary classical music meaningful—and thus valuable—to audiences. My research focuses on French and American classical music composed since 1930, especially Olivier Messiaen’s music and thought, the pressures of place and globalization on musical composition, and aesthetic and social issues affecting contemporary music in France and the United States. Regardless of the subject matter, my work unveils layers of meaning in music that enhance both the listening experience and the music’s relevance to culture at large.

 

Although I make use of archival and biographical research, my work is distinguished by its recreation of a broad web of culture and by its imaginative, research-based interpretations that give meaning to music, an approach informed by New Historicism. By drawing from two recent offshoots of ecocriticism, spatiality and geocriticism, my work includes some of the first musicological studies to theorize and exemplify ways in which music and place shape one another. My scholarship is also influenced by Big Data and the digital humanities movement. I often work with unusually large numbers (sometimes hundreds) of pieces for a single research project. This method is slow and difficult, but yields conclusions that reach far more deeply into culture than can be drawn from a traditional study on a single composition.

 

I am now writing a book on how geography illuminates the shifting political, racial, class-based, and religious pressures that mediate musical representations of Appalachia and American identity. As a co-founder of the AMS Ecocriticism Study Group, I explore how the physical environment (and ideas about it) influence composers such as Copland, Rzewski, Crumb, Hailstork, and Julia Wolfe. One chapter argues that Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring, whose fictional setting I have identified as originating on a farm thirty miles north of Pittsburgh, rejects the local topography in favor of an invented landscape that better supports Manifest Destiny. Other chapters focus on the musical representation of Pittsburgh, showing how politics molds the commissioning process and thus the manner of representing the city. I conclude that musical representations of Appalachia since 1940 increasingly emphasize its demographic diversity. Appalachia thus serves as a metonym for America as a whole during this period, a time of transition from a modernist to a postmodernist outlook, in which democracy is increasingly defined by its demographic diversity.