Research

In my monograph, I cast a new critical perspective on music’s pre-World War II avant-garde, revealing an integrated intellectual network spread across Russia, Central and Western Europe, North America, and Latin America. For fellow scholars in music history and theory, I show how, in the early twentieth century, ideas divergent from those of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) proliferated in experimental music, only to be suppressed in later reception, largely because of Schoenberg’s perceived continuity with music’s “Great German Tradition.” I recover these alternative intellectual projects through a mixture of global historiography and archival research: In the US, Henry Cowell (1897–1965) forged an international coalition with his theories of acoustics and melody; in Paris as a Russian émigré, Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979) countered Viennese theories of modern music with unique axioms of his own; and in Mexico, Julián Carrillo (1875–1965) negotiated discourses surrounding modernism and Indigeneity, both domestically, and in dialogue with the book’s other protagonists. By taking a transnational approach, I destabilize conceptions of the pre-war avant-garde’s intellectual locus in the Second Viennese School—conceptions ascendant at least since the mid-century writings of philosopher Theodor Adorno—in favor of a rich and heterogenous network.

Inventing Atonal Music draws on elements of my dissertation, “Ultramodernism in Global Musical Thought, 1900–1950,” which was awarded an SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship. My dissertation is accessible here.