Violin      Composition      Improvisation      Shows      Links      Biography      Research      Research Group     C.V.     

I am an assistant professor at the Department of Music at Cornell University and a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, where I lead the “Histories of Music, Mind, and Body Research Group.” I study the interrelations of music, mind, and body during the emergence of modern European musical cultures. How did the field of music cognition develop from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century? How did Enlightenment neurophysiology influence Romantic music? Many insights yielded by experiments in psychology for us today were available in early musical writings that prioritized introspection as method. I draw out from these writings—especially those that may be dismissed as merely speculative, amateurish, or effusive—the paradigms that also produced the most respected psychological, physiological, and philosophical treatises of their day. I've published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Music Theory, and Music Theory Spectrum, and my book Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Other projects include Sound and Sense in British Romanticism, Cambridge University Press, 2003, co-edited with James Grande, and The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, co-edited with Francesca Brittan. I am also currently working on Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, a digital anthology co-edited with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, which is under contract with the University of Chicago's OPS. Before turning to academia, I spent about a decade as a composer and performer. As a composer, my music was performed by the Arditti, Molinari, Carmel and Pacifica Quartets, and the Kammerakademie Potsdam. On violin, I was featured as a chamber musician at Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw, and the Kennedy Center, and regularly performed with the Israel Contemporary Players, the Israel Contemporary String Quartet, the Ensemble Modern Academy, and the Meitar Ensemble at a variety of international music festivals. In my early twenties, I was concertmaster of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and was a member of the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, touring across Europe and Asia under the batons of Boulez, Barenboim and Abbado. I also enjoyed improvising, and collaborated with Jason Lindner, Omer Avital, Eran Zur, Victoria Hanna, and Yoyo Ma's Silk Road Project among others, at festivals including the Winter Jazz Fest, the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, and the BRIC Jazz Festival. All graphic images in this website were adapted from cartoons by J. J. Grandville (1803-1847).