I am a musicologist, music critic, and rock musician. I studied voice and music history at Brock University, music criticism at McMaster University, and historical musicology from the University of Toronto, where I earned a PhD. At Augustana, I have served as Director of Music and as Chair of Fine Arts and Humanities; I am currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Board of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies (University of Alberta, Edmonton).
Research areas: Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, fin-de siecle-Vienna, popular music, music and psychoanalysis, zombies in popular culture, film music.
Teaching areas: music history/musicology, cultural history, popular music, theory/harmony, interdisciplinary studies
Selected topics that highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the Liberal Arts and Sciences. This seminar-style class is a key aspect of the Augustana First Year Experience. The focus and content of each course are determined by faculty interests, and vary from year to year.
Fall Term 2020Study of common-practice harmony: scales and modes, intervals, triads, figured bass, cadences, phrases, periods, sentences, nonharmonic tones, harmonic progression and rhythm, part-writing, seventh chords, diatonic modulation playing simple harmonic progression formulae on piano. Prerequisites: AUMUS 100 or a score higher than 70% in the Music Theory Placement Examination (MTPE), and completion of the Keyboard Skills Interview (KSI). Corequisite: AUMUS 162.
Winter Term 2021Development of listening approaches and techniques for understanding and appreciating a variety of Western and non-Western music, and an examination of the ideologies that prompt the sampling of such music. Music studied includes Western art music, African music, First Nations music, North Indian music, and popular music.
Fall Term 2020Study of Western European art music from the ancient Greeks to the late Baroque period, in the context of general cultural history.
Fall Term 2020An examination of the use of music in film, television, and video games, with an emphasis on semiotic analysis and the historical development of the aesthetics and technologies of linking music to moving images.
Winter Term 2021Considerations of theoretical issues related to visual arts, broadly understood and of sense experience.
Winter Term 2021