University of Minnesota

Faculty Member, Music

Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology)

About

My current book project ("Gesture, Voice, and the Musicking Body in Hindustani Music," with Wesleyan University Press) is an investigation of how the hand and voice work together to manifest melody.  It maps a discursive history of gesture, analyzes the parallel expression of melody in gesture and vocalization, and paints a new picture of how singers physically navigate raga, space, and time in the course of performance.  It also investigates the transmission of paramparic bodies--disciplined aesthetic/ethical modes of moving and singing--through face-to-face teaching lineages.

My next major project will likely deal with various traditions of voice production in India, with a special focus on their ethical force.

Other interests include comparative voice production, the musical transmission of ethical systems, the interface of raga and maqam in the 16th-19th centuries, devotional performance, prosody, birdsong, and theories of tuning and temperament that bridge arithmetic, aesthetics, and politics.

I am particularly interested in music as a ground for integral dialogue between scientific and humanistic disciplines: in Jon Barlow's words, a meta-discipline.  I am strongly committed to teaching and scholarship in the liberal arts tradition.

I love teaching.  I was inspired to be a teacher and scholar in the first place by my own generous teachers: Jon Barlow, Howard Bernstein, Bonnie Wade, Richard Crocker, Don Willson, Ben Brinner, Eve Sweetser, and Vikas Kashalkar.

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