Research

Inventing Atonal Music: Ultramodernism from Mexico to Russia (under contract; in progress)

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) developed alternative axioms for atonality, which were quietly taken up after 1945 by a new avant-garde; 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.

“Julián Carrillo, Laws of Musical Metamorphosis, and the Landscape of Early Atonal Thought” (2024)

This essay offers a translation of, and commentary on, Julián Carrillo’s Leyes de metamorfosis musicales, Chapter 1 (self-published originally as Julián Carrillo, Leyes de metamorfosis musicales [Laws of Musical Metamorphosis], 1949). In my commentary, I show how Carrilo’s text brings together a unique constellation of theoretical interests, encompassing whole-tone collections, microtonality, and pitch multiplication. I also show how Carrillo positioned his theories in relation to those of his international peers, particularly Arnold Schoenberg. Alongside many composer-theorists of the early twentieth century, Carrillo developed a conception of the atonal that was both technically systematic and deeply mythological. Understanding his ideas today contributes to an expanded history of early atonal music theory, beyond its habitual geographical boundaries.
This essay is a contribution to a special issue of Music Theory Online, “Music Theory in the Plural,” awarded the Society for Music Theory’s 2025 Citation of Special Merit.

“Modernism and Indigeneity in Post-Revolutionary Mexico” (2026)

In this conference paper, I shed new light on the indigenous identification of composer Julián Carrillo, and his complex and dialectical relationship to his rival, Carlos Chávez. By holding Carrillo and Chávez's relationship in mind, I argue, a revised picture emerges of Mexican musical modernism after 1920: a modernism characterized not only by the triumph of Chávez's indigenismo, but also by that movement's internal contradictions and hypocrisies, which produced their own musical ramifications.

I presented this paper at Global Musical Modernities and Local Agency, held at the University of Toronto in 2026.

“Utopian Futurism in the Music Theory of Ivan Wyschnegradsky” (2021)

In this conference paper, I examine the ideas of Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979), a composer-theorist who left Saint Petersburg for Paris in 1920. Wyschnegradsky’s neglected writings offer a window, I argue, into the legacy of Russian futurist music theory: into its initial utopian promise in the 1910s and ’20s, and its subsequent elaboration abroad. As much as Wyschnegradsky’s ideas engaged with those of François-Joseph Fétis and Hugo Riemann—as received and transformed by Sergei Taneev and Boleslav Yavorsky—they also expanded on notions of “ultrachromaticism” (“ультрахроматизм”), which grew directly out of Russian futurism. At another level, Wyschnegradsky’s writings dramatized a direct encounter with contemporaneous theories in Western and Central Europe; after 1920, Wyschnegradsky started to position his ideas as alternatives to the hegemonic theories Arnold Schoenberg, decentering the Second Viennese School’s claim to historical inevitability.

This paper earned me a Junior Scholar Award from the Institute for Russian Music Studies.

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