I've been working with the lovely people at Alter Ego Chamber Opera to create electronic music sound designs for their upcoming production of Alcina REVAMPED, a new English adaptation of the 18th-century opera Alcina by Georg Friedrich Handel.

I created a handful of modular synthesizer patches that were heard during transitions between scenes. You can hear three snippets of these patches-in-progress below.

​I'm excited to announce I'll be teaching a new course, "Improvisation in Theory and Practice," at the Curtis Institute in spring of 2022. The course will combine historical studies of improvisation in the jazz and European classical traditions with workshop sessions in which students will learn some basic techniques and approaches to musical improvisation. We'll be joined for a number of sessions by DM Hotep, a composer and guitarist who has performed with the Sun Ra Arkestra for over 20 years.

The Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia recently published the catalogue for their 2020–21 exhibit Sam Feinstein, Group '55, and Midcentury Abstraction in Philadelphia​, and I wrote a short essay on the three composers associated with the modernist collective Group '55: George Rochberg, Vincent Persichetti, and Joseph Castaldo.

I'm excited to be exploring the music and life of the composer Julius Eastman at the Curtis Institute in the fall. Eastman was a unique and important figure in American music, whose legacy is slowly coming to light through research, teaching, and performances of his work. My draft course proposal is below.
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I'll be in Edinburgh, Scotland, this October to present at the two-day symposium Recursions: Music and Cybernetics. Looking forward to meeting up with a few old friends and colleagues and hearing from other people working in this field! My paper is called "Music, Models, and the Nonhuman," and the abstract is below.
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I'll be traveling to Sao Paolo, Brazil in a couple weeks to present a paper at the Sonologia International Conference on Sound Studies. Looking forward to meeting many new people and launching my new research project on music and systems thinking in the late 20th century. My abstract is below.

I had a great time at the symposium of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium on December 7, 2018. I read my paper "Abstract Machines in Experimental Music," on the idea of the machine in the writings of Ross Ashby and parallels in the work of British composer John White. This is the first paper I've presented as part of my new research project on music, systems, and cybernetics in twentieth-century music. 
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My book Instruments for New Music has been reviewed by Erica Scheinberg in the journal Twentieth-Century Music. It's an excellent summary of the book, and includes some sound critiques as well. Here are a few excerpts:

Thomas Patteson’s monograph, based on his 2013 dissertation, brilliantly illuminates this fascinating but little-known chapter of German music history. Readers with special interest in the music of the Weimar Republic or the history of music technology no doubt will be captivated by the details of Patteson’s case studies. He describes the machines and careers of individuals who are often labelled ‘pioneers’ in surveys of electronic music, but whose experimental endeavours rarely have been described in detail in textbooks or scholarly literature.

Patteson’s book positions the ‘instruments for new music’ of its title not within a modernist historical trajectory, but as products of a particular time and place. Never before have the instruments of the 1920s and 1930s been so richly contextualized within a broader view of German intellectual thought. [...] Patteson conveys the status of the instruments within music institutions of the period: contemporary music festivals and radio exhibitions, the Bauhaus, the November Group artists’ organization, and the research departments established in 1928 at the Berlin Academy of Music and the Berlin Institute of Technology. He also situates the new instruments and their reception with respect to the German national politics of the interwar period. [...] As musicologists today seek to de-emphasize and demystify the archetype of the ‘genius’ composer, Patteson’s book presents an approach to music history that is neither composer- nor work-centric. 

Winner of the American Musicological Society’s 2017 Lockwood Award, which recognizes a ‘book of exceptional merit’ published by an early career scholar, Instruments for New Music is an essential book for anyone who studies, writes about, or teaches topics in music technology, modernism, or Weimar culture. Patteson beautifully summarizes concepts in German intellectual history without assuming that his reader has read the relevant texts, and he includes many accessible technical discussions of the music machines and processes he writes about, breaking concepts down for readers and not assuming advanced understanding of the principles of electricity and engineering. Patteson has published the book with Luminos, the University of California Press’s open-access publishing programme for monographs, which no doubt will encourage a wide range of readers to explore this fascinating book.

I wrote a very short blog post for University of California Press to explain why I chose open access publishing for my book Instruments for New Music.