Amy Beach and the Hermit Thrush

One of the more fun projects of my academic career so far was recently released: a 15-minute video essay on Amy Beach’s “Hermit Thrush at Morn” (1922) and its innovative use of birdsongs transcribed by Beach during her composition process. I found the video essay format challenging at times, but I really enjoyed using this medium to look at Beach’s piano music through several comlpementary lenses. I think it was especially effective at helping me survey numerous different notation systems for birdsong very quickly, and to convey a much more vivid sense of this sound world than any text-based essay ever could.

Let's Think in Layers

I enjoyed writing this short piece in Music Theory Spectrum’s recent symposium on Public Music Theory — a set of responses to the talks delivered at the 2023 plenary session at the Society for Music Theory conference. My contribution examines the concept of “twenty-first-century instruments of music theory” as a form of public instruction and engagement, arguing that modern tools like DAWs (and even the internet itself!) give us not only new ways of sharing musical insights, but new ways of exploring and expressing what music is and how it works.

Amy Beach: Between Art & Science talk notes

Here, you can find PPT slides for my talk “Between Art and Science: Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush Pieces and Early-Twentieth-Century Birdsong Transcription” at UT-Austin, March 28, 2025

Slides (pdf export)

Two Views of Distance in Amy Beach's "When Soul is Joined to Soul"

If you’re here at the 2024 SMT conference here in Jacksonville — or even if you’re not — you can find my poster-slides here, with a bit more time to examine them on your own. Thanks for your interest in my work!

Link to Slides

New Publication! My Contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound

In the summer of 2019, I conducted a few days of archival research at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. I wasn’t really sure what I would find, but I was focused on their extensive archive of corporate documents from the Atari corporation: more than 80 boxes of technical documents, memos, agendas, sketches, advertisements, financial statements, and more!

I didn’t know what I was going to find, though I went in keeping my eyes out for interesting details about music and sound. It was a very happy coincidence that one of the best examples of sound and music in their process of game development centered on two Star Wars arcade games they made in the 1980s. I came home with hundreds of archival images, and I put together a talk for the 2020 North American Conference on Video Game Music. That conference was unfortunately forced online by Covid, but it resulted in a YouTube video presentation that I remain very proud of:

At some point after that, my colleague and friend Will Gibbons invited me to contribute a written version to the Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound that he was co-editing. I have very fond memories (fonder than with most projects) of going back through the Strong Museum archival finds, and supplementing them with more sources from around the internet, mostly hosted by enthusiast websites and digital archives. The final result is linked here!