I'm excited to give a conference talk on my translation of Ernst Ferand's book on the history of improvisation in European music at the 2025 meeting of the International Musicological Society this July in Valencia, Spain. I've been working on this project in mostly monk-like solitude for well over a year now, so it will be a joy to share it with the world. The abstract is below.

I'm keen on talking about this thing, so reach out if you or your institution would like to host me!


An Alternate History of European Music: Translating Ernst Ferand's Die Improvisation in der Musik
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In his 1938 book Die Improvisation in der Musik, the Hungarian scholar and music educator Ernst Ferand (1887–1972) presents nothing less than an alternate history of European music. Through groundbreaking readings of primary and secondary sources, Ferand reconstructs a forgotten network of improvised practices that were central to the early development of European music (from plainchant, to Medieval organum and discant, to Renaissance counterpoint and instrumental dances). Further, Ferand shows that even after the advent of notation, written and improvisational practices coexisted for centuries, their creative friction generating new forms and genres.

More radically, by engaging with the field then known as “comparative musicology” (what we would now call ethnomusicology), Ferand identifies numerous transcultural parallels between improvisational practices. In particular, he suggests that improvisational evidence supports the controversial “Oriental hypothesis” that the music of the Medieval and Renaissance periods was profoundly influenced by Europe’s neighbors to the east. For Ferand, improvisation is not the domain of non-Western “others,” but rather a universal human activity whose relative independence from notation makes it an ideal medium of intercultural musical exchange.

Finally, Ferand argues that the eventual decline of improvisation in European music isolated this tradition not only from the influence of other cultures, but also from the generative springs of musical praxis itself. Accordingly, his history of improvisation is also intended as an intervention in the field of music education, in which he argues for a return to improvisation-informed pedagogy as a way of revitalizing musical life and reconnecting theory and practice.

In this talk, I will present some of the major themes of Ferand’s book, outline its intellectual and historical contexts, and discuss some of the challenges and questions I have encountered in the course of translating this important work of scholarship.

This fall I'll be teaching a new course at Penn as part of the school's First-Year Seminar program, "Music and the Exploration of Consciousness." The prospectus is below. 

​I'm excited to delve into this with some adventurous students!

The great psychologist William James wrote that “our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” Taking this idea as a springboard for this class, we pose the question: what happens if we consider music as a tool for the exploration of consciousness?
 
In this course, we will explore the relationship between music and the spectrum of consciousness, from mindfulness and relaxation to ecstatic trances and out-of-body experiences. Drawing primarily on the disciplines of musicology, anthropology, and consciousness studies, we will grapple with the following questions: How has music been used in conjunction with religious, meditative, and mind-altering practices in different human cultures around the globe? What commonalities and distinctions can we find among these practices? What kinds of musical techniques are correlated with them? And what does the study of consciousness tell us about music's mysterious power to literally change our minds?

In addition to substantial reading and class discussion, we will also conduct some first-hand experiments with the music-mediated exploration of alternate states of consciousness. Students will be expected to use their voices, perform breathing exercises, and learn basic techniques of meditation as part of class activities. No experience in these practices is required, only willingness and an open mind.

I'm pleased to announce the second album-shaped offering by Argyle Torah, my duo project with Aaron Pond. Drilling Holes in Chaotic Blob is a recording of a live performance at Pageant Soloveev in Philadelphia from December 7, 2024. Video footage of this performance can be viewed on YouTube, if you're into that sort of thing.

The title is inspired by the Daoist text known as the Zhuangzi (specifically, Brook Ziporyn's English translation), whose zany logic has insinuated itself into our music.

Just short of 20 minutes, the album is what used to be called an EP. In spite of its brevity, we hope you'll find it's chock full of auditory vitamins and minerals.

In January 2023, I started a weekly open improvisation session at the community space known as the Rotunda in West Philadelphia. Over the past year and a half, these sessions have grown into a self-sustained, unpredictable, and generative musical community. You can read more about them thanks to this article by Thomas Hagen in the Broad Street Review.

I'm working on a translation of a book called Die Improvisation in der Musik (Improvisation in Music), published in German in 1938 by the Hungarian musicologist Ernst Ferand. The book is widely regarded as the only in-depth history of improvisation in European classical music-- although, interestingly, its historical coverage extends only to circa 1600. (The fact that the book is still over 400 pages long gives you an idea of its thoroughness.)

This a major project that will take several years and I believe this book, when available to a broader readership, will change the way we think about improvisation and music history. 

The translation will be published by Routledge as part of their series Classic European Studies in the Science of Music.

I'm pleased to announce that Deirdre Loughridge and I will be writing a book version of our long-running website project, the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments. This will involve organizing the instruments into new, conceptually organized chapters, as well as conducting new research and adding some new instruments to the collection! The book will be published by Reaktion Books in London.

I am delighted to announce the launch of People's Music Supply, a platform for creative music-making and community-building that builds on the amazing work of my friend and colleague Aaron Pond. Please check out our website to see what we're up to!

Many years ago (in 2009), I started a music blog called Acousmata to document my musical interests and investigations as they then existed, and to have an outlet to help me survive the hothouse of graduate school. That lasted until 2013, when work and family duties, combined with a general sense of things having run their course, led me to stop posting. Ten years later, and with a new sense of musical reality influenced primarily by my deepening engagement with creative music and non-European traditions, I'm back at it with a new music blog called Possible Music. 

The purpose of Possible Music is simple: to cleanse the doors of musical perception and prepare our selves for the higher potentialities of human existence that shimmer through the best music. Mostly I'll be posting links to recordings with some commentary, but I'll also be sharing other forms of content as well (images, texts, poetry, random musings).

​Argyle Torah, my duo project with multi-instrumentalist Aaron Pond, has released its first album: Mixed Multitude, a live recording of our recent concert performance at Fidget Space in Philadelphia.
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This performance felt somewhat miraculous. We had played a short set the night before that we agreed was mediocre. Then, the next day, slightly frazzled and without having practiced in the meantime, we summoned this continuous 40-minute set-- twice as long as anything we had done before-- which seemed to take its own shape, like fluid poured into a vessel.

​Although we had practiced intensively in the weeks leading up to the performance, we had not "rehearsed" anything resembling what you hear in the recording. In addition, this was our first public appearance with an expanded array of instruments, expanding from our original voice-and-electronics format. We knew this performance was going to be a stretch, but we didn't know it would feel like a quantum leap to a new state of musical being.

I should also mention that this recording is taken from the middle of a three-hour performance, the outer parts of which took the form of an open-format jam session. For the entire duration, the musicians were joined by improvising dancers, and the energy we exchanged with them transfigured the event into something ritualistic and otherworldly.

I love the title that Aaron chose for this album. The image of the "Mixed Multitude," which nicely captures the smorgasbordal vibes of our performance, also has powerful political resonance at this moment of reactionary appeals to purity and order. It is as a mixed multitude that we will survive, or not at all.