Thinker

I've always been one of those musicians who thinks about it a lot, but I went all in when I got my Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of Kentucky. My dissertation was "Meter, Phrase, and Form in the Compositions of Maria Schneider." It's pretty typical to turn dissertation chapters into journal articles, and that's the origin of "Maria Schneider's Forms: Norms and Deviations in a Contemporary Jazz Corpus," which the Journal of Music Theory awarded the David Krahenbuehl Prize for the best article written by an untenured scholar in 2018-2019.

I also wrote "A Theory of Jazz Performance Practice" as part of the A-R Editions Online Music Anthology, introducing a somewhat novel way of thinking about how jazz musicians improvise within the structure of a tune. I've delivered numerous conference papers on topics like microrhythm, jazz harmony, and methodological issues. And I've been invited to share my research on both jazz and theory pedagogy in virtual talks at the University of North Texas Division of Jazz Studies, Wheaton College, and the University of South Carolina.