Curriculum Vitae

I am doctoral candidate in composition and musicology at New York University. My research interests include musical affect, popular music, psychoanalysis, sexuality and emotion. My dissertation, titled "Affect, Intimacy, and Identification in Popular Musical Performance", is advised by Suzanne Cusick (Music, NYU), Ann Pellegrini (Performance Studies, Religious Studies, NYU), and Annie J. Randall (Music, Bucknell). The project investigates the ways in which particular techniques of popular vocal musical performance, such as sprechstimme, crooning, or belting, come to index particular emotions such as torment, love, or compassion.

In the first chapter, "Rethinking the Intimacy of Voice and Ear: Intimacy, affect, and pleasure in the discourse of hysteria", I historicize the notion that voice indexes the speaker’s inalienable identity by examining how the relation of vocality and identity was mediated through psychoanalytic discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the capacity of the voice to mediate intimacy between singer and listener is a twentieth century phenomenon that parallels the development of mass popular culture, using both the vocal performances of the so called "Epileptic Singers" of the French cafe-concert, and that of Albertine Zehme, the singer who premiered Schoenberg’s music drama Pierrot Lunaire as case studies. Subsequent chapters survey changes in vocal technique and production across the twentieth century, investigating the ways in which both physiological techniques and audio production techniques such as compression, echo and reverb, aim to produce a physical closeness between singer and listener.