Publications
Below is a list of my publications, both academic and non-academic
Please contact me if you need help accessing any of these materials
Academic publications (articles and book chapters)
2027 (expected)
Black Musical Theorizing: Reimagining Musical Structure
Monograph under contract with The University of Chicago Press
2026 (expected)
“Analyzing Interaction in Free Improvisation: A Case Study from Musica Elettronica Viva”
In Collective Improvisation and Instant Composition in Europe: 1960–1980, edited by Gianmario Borio. Routledge. (forthcoming)
2026 (expected)
“Affordances and Free Improvisation: An Analytical Framework”
In Making Music Together: Analytical Perspectives on Musical Interaction, edited by Garrett Michaelsen and Chris Stover. Oxford University Press. (forthcoming)
2025
“Eric Dolphy’s and Yusef Lateef’s Synthetic Formations”
This article focuses on a “synthetic scale” reproduced in Yusef Lateef’s Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns and attributed to Eric Dolphy. Linking music theory, jazz studies, and Black performance theory, I deploy archival research and meta-theoretical analysis to discuss the various music-theoretical, creative, social, and political resonances of this entry. The article positions Dolphy’s scale and Lateef’s engagement with it as a testament to the communal “Black study” of 1960s jazz, implicates music theory in contemporaneous issues regarding racial politics, and explores how music theory informs creative practice in these musicians’ work.
2023
“Adventures in Tonal Gravity: George Russell’s Analysis of Maurice Ravel’s ‘Forlane’”
George Russell conceptualized his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization as a theory of tonality. He includes an analysis of the opening of Maurice Ravel’s “Forlane” from Le Tombeau de Couperin in the fourth and final edition of his text to demonstrate what his theory—“The Concept”—offers for the analysis of Western art music. This article takes Russell’s claim seriously, discusses The Concept as a theory of tonality, and extends Russell’s analysis to the entirety of “Forlane.” I also connect Russell’s work to broader Black cultural practices and their socio-political resonances.
2022
“On the Inside: Jazz Liner Notes as a Music-Theoretical Medium”
In The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, edited by J. Daniel Jenkins. Oxford University Press
2021
“Fugitive Music Theory and George Russell’s Theory of Tonal Gravity”
This article theorizes a network of “fugitive music theory” and examines George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953) as a case study. Fugitive music theory represents a genealogy of texts, concepts, and people that suggests we fundamentally rethink who and what counts as music theory, and Russell provides a profound theory of tonality that intervenes in our field’s current approaches to this topic and repertoire. After outlining some of Russell’s core concepts, several analyses demonstrate the utility of his theory using excerpts from various tonal compositions, including those by William Grant Still, Marion Bauer, Howard Swanson, Margaret Bonds, Richard Strauss, and Charles Ives. This article seeks to unearth and redress anti-Black racism in music theory, even as it also discusses the challenges of doing this work.
[Winner of the Society for Music Theory’s 2023 Emerging Scholar Award (Article)]
2017
“Subjective (Re)positioning in Musical Improvisation: Analyzing the Work of Five Female Improvisers”
This article analyzes the music of five female improvisers. I employ these women’s lived experiences of discrimination as a basis for my analysis of improvisation in terms of what I call subjective (re)positioning.
Given these women’s experiences of discrimination, trust means something far richer than musically working together during performance. Trusting improvising partners create a conceptual space in which musicians are able to position and reposition themselves, thus expressing agency.
Reviews
2020
Review of Making It Up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond by Leslie A. Tilley (University of Chicago, 2019)
2017
Review of Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman (Duke University Press, 2016)
Other Publications
2025
“‘He Sees Beauty in that Everlasting Struggle for Truth’: Anthony Braxton’s Diagrammatics”
In Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, special volume, Darmstadt
2020
“Stretching Boundaries: Improvised Interaction across Liminal Spaces”
In Sound American 23: “The Alien Issue”
2019
2017
“The Challenge of Comparing Improvisation Across Domains”
In American Music Review XLV (2) (co-authored with Andrew Goldman)