Songness of Songs

A creative and scholarly interrogation of what distinguishes “song” as a particular mode of musical expression. The contemporary sense of song-as-audio, for example, allows for a wider range of sonic materials to be song-like than the historical senses of song-as-lead-sheet, or song-as-folk-knowledge. What unites these divergent senses of songness, and how can critical thinking about song spark creative exploration of new song forms?

Includes dissertation work on Scott Walker’s late trilogy of albums and general exam research on the David Grubbs and Susan Howe collaboration.

“Scott Walker’s Avant-Garde Idiom and the Composition of Perceptual Space,” a paper about the manipulation of virtual and musical spaces in the song “Phrasing” from Bish Bosch, presented at the Society for Music Theory Annual Meeting in 2019.