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Mindfulness: a Tool or a Skill? (2019)
I compare approaches to mindfulness taken in Vanessa Cornett’s The Mindful Musician: Mental Skills for Peak Performance and Holly Rodgers’ The Mindful Twenty-Something: life skills to handle stress … & everything else in light of James Reveley’s criticisms of mindfulness as presented in his article “Neoliberal meditations: How mindfulness training medicalizes education and responsibilizes young people.”
Developing and Evaluating Methods of Noticing Through Which I Unexpectedly Learn a Lot About Moving My Feet (2019)
Drawing heavily on the principles of the Alexander Technique, I develop and refine methods of observing my body at the harp across a ten-day period. As a result, I develop specific and innovative strategies for moving my feet at the harp pedals with minimal tension.
The Impact of Transposition on the Memorization of Contemporary Scores (2018)
Can transposition can be used to facilitate the formation of an “underlying mental representation” of music? Is transposition is an effective strategy for memorizing both atonal and tonal music? I draw observations from looking at existing literature on the subject and conducting a four-week “experiment” on myself.
Symmetry in Morton Feldman’s Coptic Light and Boulez’s Rituel (2017)
After comparing competing definitions of “symmetry,” I use these definitions to compare approaches to symmetrical organization in Morton Feldman’s Coptic Light and Boulez’s Rituel.
“The Artificial and the Natural in Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31.” (2015)
I examine the use of melodic motives as the basis of larger harmonic structures and the use of symmetrical and asymmetrical pitch sets for the purposes of textual mimesis in Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings.