Graduate Students
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
Cristina Cruz-Uribe
Cristina received a B.Mus. in Viola Performance and a B.A. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the Honors College at the University of Oregon in 2007. Her research focuses on intersections between music, literature, and popular culture in Latin America from the colonial period to the present. Current projects examine the voice and mystical experience in nunsī writings from colonial Peru, and music and urban geography in contemporary Brazil. At Yale this research has been supported by a Mac-Millan Center Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant (2008) and a CLAIS Travel Award (2009). Cristina is currently serving as Student Representative for the Northeast Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
back to top
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.
back to top
Amy Dunagin
Amy Dunagin (2007) holds a bachelors degree in history from Yale University, where she wrote a senior thesis on political broadside ballads and their influence in late seventeenth century England. She is pursuing a joint Ph.D. program in music history and Renaissance studies. Her current research focuses on the music of the English Reformation.
back to top
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.
back to top
Anna Gawboy
Anna Gawboy (2004) is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory. Her dissertation, on the music of Alexander Scriabin, uses concepts and aesthetic principles drawn from the composer's diverse philosophical interests as a means to establish analytical values for his late, "non-tonal" music. She has had papers accepted to the Society for Music Theory Annual Meeting, the New England Conference of Music Theorists, Special Symposium on Performance and Analysis at Indiana University, and the Yale University Slavic Studies Colloquium. 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 beyond her dissertation include nineteenth-century approaches to meter and form, early twentieth-century Russian music and theater, music theory pedagogy, and the history and philosophy of science.
back to top
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.
back to top
Jonathan Guez
Jonathan Guez (2008), originally from Houston, TX, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in piano performance from Texas Tech University (2005), and a Master of Music degree in music theory from Indiana University Bloomington (2008). In addition to his domestic performance education, which culminated in winning a concerto competition at Texas Tech, he also studied piano at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where he gave several public recitals. Although he has written extensively on the analysis of sonata form movements and on tonal (and formal) analysis from a Schenkerian perspective, his current research interests in music theory include, but are not limited to, emotion and meaning in music, hermeneutic and critical theories, semiotics, and other philosophical trends.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
Aaron Judd
Aaron Judd (2008) hails from Portland, Oregon and graduated from Oberlin College/Conservatory with degrees in Composition and English literature. He is interested in late 19th and 20th century music in a global cultural and artistic context, musical interplays with literature, experimental music, and the poetic and musical art forms of East and South-East Asia, especially the Chinese diaspora. He composes, plays the piano, and is often tinkering with "novels" that have yet to materialize. Prior to Yale, he studied and taught for two years in Kunming, China courtesy of an Oberlin Shansi Fellowship.
back to top
Megan Kaes
Megan Kaes (2008), a native of Littleton, Colorado, holds a B.A. in Music from Pomona College in Claremont, California. At Yale she studies music theory, and her research interests include the history of music theory, music perception and cognition, and both early music and twentieth-century music. Megan is an avid singer, pianist, and handbell ringer, and she performs with the Yale Camerata and its chamber choir, Pro Musica.
back to top
Allie Kieffer
Allie Kieffer (2008), a native of Iowa, holds a BA in music from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, where she wrote a senior thesis on nationalistic tensions in the chamber music of Gabriel Fauré. As an aspiring music historian, her interests focus primarily on nineteenth century instrumental music and the development of romanticism in Germany and France. She is also interested in literary theory, feminist critique, and the relationship of music and metaphor, among other things. As a pianist, she is particularly enthusiastic about nineteenth-century chamber music.
back to top
Kevin Koai
Kevin Koai (2009) is a Ph.D. student in music history who received his B.A. in music (piano performance) and English from Stanford University. His interests center on the relationship between music and literature as it applies to a wide range of music, including German, American, and English art song. Other interests include critical theory and performance studies. Apart from his studies, he enjoys singing with the Yale Camerata and Pro Musica.
back to top
Elizabeth Medina-Gray
Elizabeth Medina-Gray (2008) holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in music and chemistry from Swarthmore College, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in music theory at Yale. Her current interests include mathematical musical models, 20th century tonal music, early music, and music in present-day visual multimedia.
back to top
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. Her dissertation is about sing-alongs in the American movie theater before 1940, with a particular emphasis on nostalgia, modernity, and the power of group singing. On her own time, she collects and breeds snakes and plays with her parrot Ruckous, in addition to singing with the Yale Schola Cantorum and playing cello in the Yale Symphony Orchestra. A highlight of her Yale experience has been singing Speranza in the Yale Baroque Opera Project production of Monteverdi's Orfeo, headed by professor Ellen Rosand.
back to top
John Muniz
John Muniz (2009) is a Ph.D. student in music theory. Originally from New Jersey, he holds a BA in Music with Highest Honors from The College of William & Mary, and an MM in Composition from Boston University. His research interests include phenomenology, philosophies of musical analysis, and theory of harmony, especially contemporary tonal and non-tonal harmony. John is an avid composer and pianist, performing both solo and chamber repertoire.
back to top
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.
back to top
Lynda Paul
Lynda Paul (2006) is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology. Her current research interests include performance studies, media theory, music and theater, globalization, historiography, and the relationship between aesthetic values and ideology. Her dissertation, which integrates issues related to these topics, centers on spectacular forms of musical multimedia in the years following the Cold War. She holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and the Eastman School of Music.
back to top
James Park
James Park (2008) received his A.B. in Music from Princeton University in 2007; he wrote his senior thesis on Samuel Barber's Symphony in One Movement. His (ever-changing) interests include 20th-century music, particularly that of the tonal tradition. In addition to being a music history student, he is also a violinist in the Yale Symphony Orchestra and an avid chamber musician.
back to top
Carmel Raz
Born in 1982, Carmel grew up in the United States and Israel. She holds degrees in violin performance from the Hochschule fuer Musik "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin, Germany, and in composition from the University of Chicago. Her interests include theories of meter, geometry as applied to music and the analysis of contemporary repertoire. More information about her can be found at http://www.carmelraz.com
back to top
André Redwood
André Redwood (2004) is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory. He holds M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from Yale and a B.M. from the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. His research interests center on the intellectual, cultural, and social history of music theory, particularly with respect to writings that draw analogies between rhetoric and music. These interests converge in his dissertation (provisionally entitled "The Eloquent Science of Music") which explores the role of rhetoric in the music-theoretical writings of seventeenth-century polymath Marin Mersenne. He has also had a long-standing interest in the music of Shostakovich, from both analytical and historical perspectives.
back to top
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 Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen with Houston Grand Opera, and currently sings with Yale's Schola Cantorum.
back to top
Joseph Salem
Joseph Salem (2007) is originally from Cincinnati, OH, where he engaged in a sporadic study of piano at the CCM Preparatory Department. He holds a BM in Piano from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in Music Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a lover of new and old traditions, Joe pursues studies at the boundaries of the musicological discourse: musical/intellectual history, analytical studies of post-Wagnerian music and writings, music aesthetics (in relation to theoretical and historical texts on music generally), and marxist, modernist, and postmodern discourse in relation to phenomenological issues and the criticism of social modes of listening. He's also a cat lover and silly for culinary delights.
back to top
Matthew Schullmann
Matthew Schullman (2008) is a graduate student in Music Theory and comes to Yale from Boston, MA, where he earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Music from Boston University. His analytic interests vary; thus far, however, his work has focused on music of the twentieth century, especially that of Gyorgy Ligeti. In his copious free time, Matt works with the artistic staff of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, practices the piano, and spends time honing his culinary skills.
back to top
Kris Shaffer
Kris Shaffer is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory and is currently working on a dissertation on György Ligeti's approach to consonance, dissonance, and non-standard tuning, particularly in his later works. Besides studying the music of 20th-century composers, his interests include music cognition, popular music theory and analysis, and the role of technology in various musical disciplines. From 2005 to 2008, he served as the editor of Am Steg, an online community and resource for young music theorists and composers, which included co-authoring a blog on music cognition and co-hosting a podcast interviewing composers, theorists, and discussing significant topics for graduate students in the academic music field. Archives from Am Steg can be found on Kris's website at http://kris.shaffermusic.com. He holds a Master of Philosophy and a Master of Arts in music theory from Yale University, a Master of Music in orchestral performance from the Chicago College of Performing Arts, and a Bachelor of Music in performance (with an honors thesis in music theory) from Lawrence University in Wisconsin. Kris is also an active performer and church musician. He directs the Sunday morning service music ministry at Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven and performs from time to time as a freelance musician in Connecticut and Massachusetts. He has performed with the Berkshire Symphony Orchestra (Williamstown, Mass.), the Illinois Symphony (Springfield, Ill.), and the Green Bay Symphony (Green Bay, Wis.).
back to top
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.
back to top
Christin Thomas
Christy Thomas (2009) is a Ph.D. student in music history. Originally from Baltimore, MD, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in music, art history, and history from McDaniel College, where she wrote her senior theses on the use of opera as a tool for cultural stratification in 19th century Philadelphia, and on the ideological and stylistic connections between Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro and selected engravings of Philibert-Louis Debucourt from the late 1780's. Her broad research interests include, but are not limited to, the history and theory of opera, reception history, and performance practice. As a classically trained singer, she has a passion for the performance of art song, has been involved with several professional opera performances in Baltimore, and especially enjoys performing and recording little known pieces from within her research.
back to top
Benjamin Thorburn
Benjamin Thorburn (2005) is a Ph.D. candidate in music history. He is writing a dissertation on Monteverdi reception in the 20th century, focusing on adaptations of the Venetian operas made by composers including Dallapiccola, Krenek, Goehr, Ghedini, and Henze. He is from Maynard, Massachusetts, and received a Bachelor of Arts in music from the University of Rochester. As a singer, he performs with Yale Schola Cantorum and recently appeared as Caronte in Monteverdi's Orfeo with the Yale Baroque Opera Project. His research interests also include American music and music in Christian liturgy.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
Asher Yampolsky
Asher Vijay Yampolsky is from Montreal and received his B.Mus. from McGill in Music Theory and Music History with a concentration in viola and a minor in linguistics. He is now a music theory PhD student, but he likes context. His two main repertories of interest for research are organum from its earliest conception as an improvisatory art to its culmination of complexity in Notre Dame Polyphony (late 12th- and early 13th-century Parisian sacred music) and Sibelius, with a focus on defining systems of counterpoint, and, for the latter topic, harmony as well. Linguistic and mathematical models of analysis are especially appealing. Favourite repertories/composers outside of immediate research concerns include: chant, medieval sequences, Ockeghem, Josquin's generation, Corelli and his students, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruch, Vaughan Williams, Ewazen, Canadian folk music, the 90s, and current Canadian indie.
back to top
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.
back to top
