Graduate Students
Ian Bates
Ian Bates (2003) is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory who holds Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees from Yale University. A native of Burlington, Ontario, Canada, he earned a Bachelor of Music in theory and composition from the University of Western Ontario (UWO) where he was a National Scholar and gold medalist. A pianist, Ian is also an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto (A.R.C.T.) and studied with Ronald Turini at UWO. His research interests include 20th-century tonality and modality, theories of harmonic function, music theory pedagogy, and performance as analysis. His dissertation theorizes modal harmonic function and large-scale modal relationships in the music of Vaughan Williams.
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Nick Betson
Nick Betson came to Yale in 2005 after studying in Chicago and Berlin. His research interests include the history of music theory and criticism (especially of the 19th and 20th centuries), hermeneutics, Adorno, Marxes of any kind, the lyric in music, and Mozart's operas.
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Damian Blättler
Damian Blättler (2006), originally from Boston, holds a Bachelor of Arts in music from Harvard University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the relationship of Ravel's music to contemporary currents in French literature.
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Christopher Brody
Christopher Brody earned his BMus in piano performance at Northwestern University, and also holds MA (music theory) and DMA (piano performance) degrees from the University of Minnesota. His research has mostly dealt with issues in tonal music, including work on Handel, Brahms, Samuel Barber, and Schenkerian theory. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he has performed as a classical pianist in several West Coast and Midwestern cities, while dabbling in jazz piano, harpsichord, and accordion. Since 2007, he has been working on a Ph.D. in music theory at Yale.
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Vasili Byros
Vasili Byros (2003) is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory writing a dissertation on tonality as a cognitive system in music from 1770-1830. Related and other research interests include the analogies/homologies between the philosophy of music and that of language, the history of music theory in France from 1600-1900, and the aesthetico-historical and analytical problems surrounding Viennese music from the so-called fin-de-siècle. He has recently pursued the last of these with a paper on Berg’s Piano Sonata given at the 2006 SMT meeting in Los Angeles as well as at two regional conferences of the same year (MTSNYS and NECMT). The paper received the Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award offered by the Music Theory Society of New York State, and is to be published in 2008.
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Cristina Cruz-Uribe
Cristina Cruz-Uribe (2007) received a Bachelor of Music in viola performance and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish from the R.D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. She completed a senior thesis on cathedral music in Lima, Peru between 1728 and 1765. At Yale, she is studying historical musicology with a concentration in Latin American studies. Her current research focuses on cathedral villancicos, as well as convent literature and music in colonial Peru. Other interests include performance practice, eighteenth-century string chamber music and Jesuit history.
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Julia Doe
Julia Doe (2007) is a Ph. D. student in music history. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in music from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where she wrote a senior thesis on Poulenc and surrealism. She plans to pursue further research in the music and literature of twentieth century France. Trained as a classical violinist, she performs with the Yale Symphony Orchestra and enjoys spending her summers teaching and playing chamber music in her native Seattle.
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Amy Dunagin
Amy Dunagin (2007) holds a bachelors degree in history from Yale University. She is pursuing a joint Ph.D. program in musicology and Renaissance studies. Her current research focuses on the music of the English Reformation.
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Denise Elshoff
Denise Elshoff (2001) is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory. She received a Bachelor of Music in music theory and violin performance at The Ohio State University, and is now working on a dissertation titled “Melody, Counterpoint, and Tonality in Shostakovich's String Quartets Nos. 1–8,” under the guidance of Daniel Harrison. Her research interests include Russian music, especially Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Gubaidulina, as well as the theoretical issues posed by tonal music of the twentieth century. She expects to graduate in the fall of 2007.
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Clare Sher Ling Eng
Clare Sher Ling Eng (2004) is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory who is currently working on a dissertation that explores how neocentric music in the late-19th and 20th centuries has dealt with the issue of creating harmonic closure. Originally from Singapore, she holds a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) from the National University of Singapore and a Bachelor of Music (horn performance) from Florida International University, where she studied with Gregory Miller. Her other research interests include the transformation of rhythmic motives and the interaction of identity politics and music in Communist China. Besides receiving university scholarships, her studies in the USA have also been generously funded by fellowships from the National Arts Council of Singapore, the Phi Kappa Phi and the Tan Kah Kee Foundation (Singapore). Outside graduate work, she has sung with the Collegium Musicum and is a member of the Yale Camerata. Between 2004-07, she also served as the first student member of the SMT Committee for Diversity.
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Anna Gawboy
Anna Gawboy (2004) is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory. Originally from northern Minnesota, she holds a Master of Music in theory from the University of Oklahoma and a Bachelor of Arts in piano from The College of St. Scholastica. Her research interests include nineteenth-century approaches to form, early twentieth-century Russian music and theater, music theory pedagogy, and the history and philosophy of science. She is currently working on a dissertation on Scriabin.
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Stephen Gosden
Stephen Gosden (2005) received his Bachelor of Music degree from the University of British Columbia. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, music cognition, musical aesthetics, and linguistics. When not engaged in the noble pursuit of music theory, he enjoys playing the piano, shooting pool, and exercising, none of which he does particularly well.
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Moira Leanne Hill
Moira Leanne Hill (2007), a Ph.D. student in music history, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Harvard, where she wrote her senior thesis on the influence of innovations in Italian vocal music on the sacred vocal concerti of Matthias Weckmann (1616-1674). She also holds a Master of Arts degree in Musicology from the University of Minnesota, where she completed a thesis examining the significance of two early seventeenth-century central German organ tablatures in demonstrating the existence of a parallel accompanimental practice to continuo. Her research interests include seventeenth-century German and Italian repertoires, particularly sacred music and keyboard idioms of this period, the intersection of performance practice with musicological research, historical keyboard instruments and their construction, historical tuning systems, organ tablatures, manuscript study, and issues of editing music.
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Lauren Holmes
Lauren Holmes (2006) received a Bachelor of Music in Music History from Rice University, where she wrote a senior thesis on the role of music in the works of Virginia Woolf. Her current research interests include choral music and its performance, particularly contemporary Scandinavian choral music, and intersections of music and literature.
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Karen Jones
Karen Jones received a Bachelor of Music degree in piano performance and music history from McGill University in 2005, and began her studies at Yale in the fall of the same year. Her research interests include the concerto in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, sociological approaches to music, performance studies, and the instrumental music of Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt.
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Seth Monahan
Seth Monahan (2002) holds a small stash of Master’s degrees in music theory and, as a souvenir from a past life, a bachelor’s degree in composition. His dissertation explores Mahler’s middle-period engagement with sonata form through an Adornian interpretive lens; the article that launched that project, “‘Inescapable’ Coherence and the Failure of the Novel-Symphony in the Finale of Mahler’s Sixth,” will appear in the Summer 2007 issue of 19th-Century Music. When that’s all done, he intends to resurrect several back-burner projects: a suite of tools for modeling the kinetic aspects of Wagner’s late style, and a study of narrative and anthropomorphic tropes in music-analytic discourse. Seth is proud to have worked for several years as a consultant and coordinator for Yale’s Graduate Teaching Center, and would be prouder still if he could ever find a name for his dissertation that didn't require a colon.
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Esther Morgan-Ellis
Esther Morgan-Ellis (2006) grew up in Port Angeles, WA, and holds a Bachelor of Music in cello performance from the University of Puget Sound. She is interested primarily in music after 1950 and before 1750, as well as in various broad philosophical and sociological issues. She performs with the Yale Camerata, Recital Chorus, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and the Yale Dramatic Association.
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James O'Leary
James O'Leary (2004) is a Ph.D. student in music history. He holds a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford in musicology and a Bachelor of Arts from Williams College in English and music. His current research interests include early 20th-century French music, music theater, and opera.
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Lynda Paul
Lynda Paul (2006) is studying historical musicology and ethnomusicology at Yale. She holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago, a Bachelor of Music degree and Certificate in World Music from the Eastman School of Music, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Rochester. She is currently interested in a wide variety of musicological questions related to performance studies, ritual, theatricality, exoticism and cultural representation, aesthetic values and their ideologies, critical theory, globalization, and multimedia from the medieval period to the present, throughout different areas of the world.
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Cara Pickett
Cara Pickett (2002) graduated from Lawrence University in Appleton, WI with a Bachelor of Music in piano performance. She is completing a dissertation entitled "Images of Sacred Space in Select Works of Debussy, 1909-1911.”
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André Redwood
André Redwood (2004) has a Bachelor of Music in music theory from the Eastman School of Music and a Master of Arts from Yale. His research interests include: intellectual, cultural, and social history of music theory, theories of rhetoric and music, music and politics, and Brazilian popular music genres (e.g. choro, bossa nova). He has also had a long-standing interest in the music of Shostakovich, from both analytical and historical/cultural perspectives. More recently, he has become interested in the history of education and its relation to musical thought.
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Valerie Rogotzke
Valerie Rogotzke (2007) studies Music History at Yale. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree in vocal performance from the Peabody Conservatory and a Master of Music degree from Rice University, where she studied voice and musicology, and has completed additional coursework at the Universiteti Oslo. Her research interests range from Medieval and Renaissance music to vocal music of all kinds to Scandinavian folk music and nationalism. She has performed in a wide variety of operas, recitals, and early music ensembles, most recently as a hen in Janá?ek’s The Cunning Little Vixen with Houston Grand Opera, and currently sings with Yale's Schola Cantorum.
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Joseph Salem
Joseph Salem is originally from Cincinnati, OH, where he studied piano as an occasional member of the CCM Preparatory Department. He holds a BM from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Loving both the new and the old, Joe has yet to write a paper on Beethoven, Mozart, or Brahms, preferring pre-common-practice trends and post-Wagnerian "new" musics. In his spare time, Joe enjoys studying domestic and international cinema from its beginnings to its contemporary practices, tries to keep up with changes in Marxist criticism and French philosophy, visits Austin, Texas, sensitizes his culinary palate, and dreams of owning a Wolf range and a cat.
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Jay Summach
Jay Summach (2005), originally from Calgary, holds a Bachelor of Arts in music and a Master of Arts in music theory from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His interests run toward short texted forms, including choral songs, twentieth-century art songs, and commercial pop music. Recently, he has been exploring intersections between hermeneutic and music-structural analytic approaches. His performance experience includes voice, guitar, mandolin and fiddle in bluegrass and folk-rock ensembles.
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Maria Svoronou
Maria Svoronou (2007) received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the Music Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She also holds a Piano Teaching Diploma and theory degrees from the Hellenic Conservatory. As an undergraduate student (2002-2007), she was exposed to several areas of musicology and music theory, such as ancient Greek music theory, history of theory, anthropology of music, history and aesthetics of music, and acoustics.
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Benjamin Thorburn
Benjamin Thorburn (2005) received a Bachelor of Arts in music from the University of Rochester in 2005. His current interests include Baroque opera and sacred music, American music, and American musical theater. He is also active in the New Haven area as a singer of opera, oratorio, and art song. He is originally from Maynard, Massachusetts.
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Danielle Ward-Griffin
Danielle Ward-Griffin (2006) studies historical musicology at Yale. She holds a Bachelor of Music in music history from McGill University (Canada) and also studied at the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). Her current research interests include opera, the relationship between music and literature, and identity with respect to gender and nationality.
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Laura Weber
Laura Weber (2002) is a Ph.D. candidate in music history. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in music history from Columbia University. Her research interests include the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, with a particular interest in the history of music theory. Her dissertation on Jerome of Moravia's late-thirteenth-century theory treatise focuses on the interaction between that work and those of other major theoretical figures of the Middle Ages and on the ways in which Jerome's treatise was influenced by contemporaneous intellectual developments, particularly at the university in Paris.
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Christopher White
Christopher White (2007) is a Ph.D. student in Music Theory. Chris holds a B.A. and B.Mus. from Oberlin College/Conservatory of Music where he studied organ with James David Christie and Haskell Thompson. He also received an M.A. in Music Theory from Queens College, CUNY. His interests include late Romanticism (especially the musical shift from the late 19th to the early 20th century), Schenker, pop music analysis, and theories of embodiment. He also is interested in Marxist and Neo-Marxist theory as a vehicle for innovative musical analysis.
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Kara Yoo
Kara Yoo (2006) holds a Master of Arts in music theory from Queens College, CUNY and an A.B. in economics from Harvard College. Her research interests include music theory and analysis, theory pedagogy, American music history, and dance studies.
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