RESEARCH

My interest in music history began with a simple question: how did music notation, a tool created to preserve and communicate sound, come to be adopted by musicians throughout the world? 

As an avid  pianist who spent much of her teenage years immersed in the music of Chopin, I gave little thought to the history of notation until I learned that the system we use today originated in medieval Europe. That discovery transformed the way I thought about music. Rather than viewing notation as a neutral technology, I became fascinated by the intellectual traditions that shaped it and by the musicians who developed theoretical language through which music was understood.

My primary area of research investigates medieval music theory through treatises written in England at the turn of the fourteenth century. My book, Sweet Consonance: Musical Discourse in England, 1280–1370, explores the musical knowledge considered foundational for English musicians and offers the first critical study of how English theorists came to understand the third as a consonant interval.

A second strand of my research examines the history of Western music in Japan and the global circulation of European musical traditions. I currently serve as co-chair of the American Musicological Society Global East Asian Music Research study group. My interest in this field grew from a formative experience as an undergraduate. While preparing for my senior piano recital, I asked whether I could include a work by a Japanese composer alongside the European repertoire I had studied. Unable to suggest one, my teacher instead recommended Claude Debussy's Pagodes from Estampes—a work inspired by Indonesian gamelan—as the closest approximation of an "Asian" musical voice. Not having the authority to say that I was referring specifically to Japanese composers, I reluctantly agreed to perform it though the experience underscored how little space composers from East Asia occupied within the traditional Western canon. 

That moment helped shape the questions that continue to guide my research and teaching today. I seek to place Japanese and other East Asian composers within the broader global history of twentieth-century Western music, not as peripheral figures but as active participants in its development.