Research

My current research projects focus on the social and expressive use of musical schemas in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera.

Article Abstracts

2025. “Reading Mozart’s Rondòs” in Analyzing Mozart’s Operas, edited by Nathan Martin and Lauri Suurpää (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Publishers).

Abstract: In this essay, I consider how the reading of an aria’s poetic text alongside its musical performance libretto could act as a mediator of audience interactivity. This essay will explore how such interactive listening relates to the two-tempo rondò arias by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his contemporaries. The volume of librettos published in non-Italian cities in the later portion of the eighteenth century testifies to the likelihood that audiences read librettos during, before, and after operatic performances. Exactly how these were read by non-Italian audiences is unclear, especially by those who had an imperfect knowledge of the Italian language. I reconstruct one potential reading strategy that privileges experiencing the endings of lines, stanzas, and poems, rather than fully grasping semantic content. I devise this end-oriented reading strategy from Barbara Smith’s 1968 monograph on poetic closure, near-contemporaneous German-language travel accounts and language primers, the metrical properties of Italian verse, and Enlightenment conceptions of time. I track this mode of engagement with the analytical tool of poetic rotations, modified from Hepokoski and Darcy’s notion of musical rotations. The rondò’s formal design hinges on its deployment of poetic and musical rotations. Whereas most late-eighteenth-century arias consisted of two quatrains that were repeated twice, the two- tempo rondò passes through its three-stanza text in highly idiosyncratic ways. The rondò generally consists of a slow ternary section, setting the first eight poetic lines, followed by a faster section that has a more flexible formal design, usually setting the final four lines. This paper describes several text-setting and formal strategies of the rondò which encode a series of miniature generic and textual breakthroughs.

2025. “A Lazzarone Figaro? Musical Neapolitanisms in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia.” Intégral 38. (LINK)

Abstract: Although Gioachino Rossini’s Figaro is one of opera’s most beloved characters, little analytical work has been dedicated to him or his music. This essay elaborates on aspects of Figaro’s character through two analytical vignettes. These vignettes add texture to Figaro’s status as a lower-class comic character and highlight his cunning and volatile temperament. The first vignette examines Figaro’s aria “Largo al factotum” as a comic patter aria inflected by a frantic tarantella topic. The second vignette contextualizes the historical musical resonances of Figaro’s parlante vocal texture in the tempo di mezzo passage of the duet “All’idea di quel metallo.” I propose that Figaro’s parlante mimics the cries of street vendors and depicts him as a crude and cunning outsider.

2025. “Rossinian Reiz: Strategic Musical Irritation and the Capturing of Attention.” Music Theory Spectrum 47/2. (https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtae028)

Abstract: Rossini’s contemporaries frequently described his operas as irritating. Some critics felt his music combined irritation with pleasure, while others felt it overstimulated them with disruptive sensuality. To analyze Rossini’s stylistic irritation, I propose a theory of musical irritation that finds it to be alluring. I call this strategic use of irritation Reiz. The function of Reiz is to seize audience attention through three domains of experience: the disruptive, the overwhelming, and the ecological. Reiz may affect a work’s orchestration, text setting, harmony, and counterpoint, and usually undercuts sentimental expression. These Rossinian techniques suggest models for analyzing recent media.

2024. “A Thread of Recitative Ruffs: Schemas and Schenker’s Analysis of ‘Erbarm es Gott’” Music Theory Online 30/2. [with Paul Sherrill] (https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.30.2.1)

Abstract: This article presents a schema-driven analysis of the accompanied recitative “Erbarm es, Gott” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Arguing that the scene is best understood in dialogue with the conventions of the Italianate “galant” style of eighteenth-century recitative, we suggest that the music is guided by a simple thread of modulation upward through the circle of fifths. This thread is driven by repeated application of a particular harmonic schema—the “ruff,” as described in Sherrill and Boyle (2015)—which prototypically displaces a consonant harmony with a #4 figure over a static bass. Tonal arrivals are repeatedly implied and then evaded, such that the recitative’s simple tonal thread is best understood in terms of events that do not actually occur. This interpretation counterpoints Heinrich Schenker’s analysis of the recitative in Der Tonwille, whose details are explored in conjunction with the schema-based perspective. The final portion of the article advances an expressive interpretation of the music, engaging also with scholarship on the Passion such as Chafe (1991). In our reading, the recitative’s tonal shape stages an experience of progressive engrossment in the diegetic world of the Passion, broken off by an abrupt narrative negation at its end.

Abstract: The critical reception of early nineteenth-century Italian opera has long focused on its supposed cloying sweetness. This sweetness, often framed as amorous, shaped the discourse and affective experiences of primo ottocento opera. Stendhal, for instance, likened Rossini’s music to lusciously ripe fruit and to sexual arousal. Adolf Bernhard Marx found a concert of Mercadante arias to leave the bitter “aftertaste of lots of sugar.” And August Wilhelm Ambros compared Rossini’s melodies to gazing into the eyes of a Titian nude. This article proposes that amorous sweetness was associated with the vocal serenade, a genre evocative of sweet melodies and the ardent love of courtship. The musical elements that articulated serenade topics, what Stephen Rumph calls figurae, saturated slow movements of early nineteenth-century Italian opera. These included pizzicato strings, sustained winds, parallel thirds, and modulations to mediant keys. Although these figurae may appear in conjunction with diegetic serenades or topical serenade passages, they also frequently appeared independent of dramatically appropriate amorous situations. This article proposes that a common configuration of serenade figurae acted as a stock orchestral texture. This convention is modeled as a musical construction: the serenade construction. It paired musical structures with the semantic meanings of the serenade. In its evocation of serenading, the toccare construction preserved scripted listening strategies for attending to vocal melodies and their associated affective responses. It consequently regulated the perception of vocal timbre and perceived melodicity.

2017. “Johann Georg Sulzer’s ‘Recitativ’ and North German Musical Aesthetics: Context, Translation, Commentary.” Music Theory Online 23/2. (https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.23.2.1)

Abstract: Johann Georg Sulzer’s “Recitativ” is a uniquely ambitious article in his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste. The longest music article in his encyclopedia and accompanied with over 100 musical examples, it describes the technical features and expressive functions of the genre of recitative through 15 rules. It also documents a regional dispute between Berlin and Hamburg over the composition of recitative. Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Adolf Scheibe, composers associated with Hamburg, are chastised in “Recitativ” for their willingness to abandon Italianate formulas and adopt French or newly invented techniques. In contrast, the Berliner Carl Heinrich Graun is celebrated, with passages of his recitative used as stylistic exemplars. In the years before the publication of “Recitativ,” a diverse group of musicians in Berlin beginning with Graun expressed distaste for French-influenced recitative, including even the Francophile Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg. The article is the product of collaboration between several Berliner authors who express their city’s Italianate taste in recitative, including Sulzer, Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, Johann Kirnberger, and Johann Friedrich Agricola. New evidence suggests that Agricola’s influence on the article is greater than previously acknowledged. Sulzer’s text is presented in a side-by-side translation. An appendix reproduces Sulzer’s 39 numbered musical examples and includes added bibliographic commentary and translations of poetic texts.

2015. “Galant Recitative Schemas.” Journal of Music Theory 59/1: 1–62. [co-authored with Paul Sherrill] (https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-2863382)

Abstract: Italianate recitative of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constituted a distinct musical language that coexisted with the familiar style of common practice music. In this article we propose a theory of that language (“galant recitative”), which we characterize in terms of a core vocabulary of fifteen melodic formulas. Appendix 1 presents a roster of these formulas, which captures a unique fingerprint of recitative, distinct from the comparable inventory of homophonic phrase schemas in Robert Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style. These recitative schemas are defined in terms of characteristic melodic profiles, harmonic contexts, formal roles, and expressive associations. One representative schema, the “O cielo,” is used to demonstrate the musical features and range of variation characteristic of all recitative schemas. The formal associations of the schemas allow us to describe the basic phrase syntax of recitative, grouping the schemas into three broad formal roles: initiatory, medial, and closing. Appendix 2 demonstrates this formal model by analyzing the dramatic climax of Leonardo Vinci and Pietro Metastasio’s opera Artaserse (1730). Additionally, some schemas have focused semantic connotations and are used to mark such utterance types as questions and witticisms. The article concludes with an analysis of scenes from act 1 of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, which shows how sensitivity to manipulations of galant recitative schemas can reveal subtle effects of characterization and dramatic continuity.