I have a couple of research areas outside of metal music, with a few publications already and more on the way, and I thought it might be helpful to organize them here for anyone who is looking for them.
Multilayered Harmony in Pop, Especially R&B and Soul
This is a research area that grew naturally out of my teaching work. As I was trying to include more popular music in my harmony classes, I kept running into these extended harmonies and wondering how they worked—but my classical music theory education didn’t seem to explain what I was seeing, so I turned to jazz theory. In addition to the publications listed below, I’ve presented a conference paper “Reconsidering IV/Sol in Soul Music” that I’m working on writing up and hope to publish soon.
2025. “Chord Tone or Harmonic-Bass Divorce? An Enactive Approach to Hearing Pedals in Popular Music.” Music Theory Online 31 (4). Coauthored with Jiayi Wang (a student at Occidental at the time of writing). https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.25.31.4/mto.25.31.4.hudson_wang.html
KEYWORDS: popular music, harmony, jazz theory, phenomenology, embodied cognition, melodic-harmonic divorce
ABSTRACT: This article synthesizes concepts from studies of harmony in popular music to create a new theory of pedals as multi-layered sonorities. We explore how pedal sonorities potentially have plural identities and possibilities for perception, shedding new light on several paradoxes or ambiguities that pedals have presented within traditional, triadic ontologies of harmony. Pedals have been historically associated with the bass voice, strictly separate from the chords above them, and usually understood as a harmonic prolongation of the tonic or dominant. But within popular music, pedals may appear in any voice, may participate in every chord, and may not play a clear prolongational role. We present a multiparameter framework for understanding pedals, and observe two new types of pedal in popular music: the sentimental pedal and the cinematic pedal. We also show how pop and jazz theories make it easier to conceptually integrate pedal notes with the surrounding harmonies. Our analyses widen the picture presented by the growing literature on melodic-harmonic divorce and harmonic-bass divorce, showing how some pedal passages can be experienced either as a stratification of divorced layers or as an integrated harmony. Finally, our conception of pedal is described from an enactive cognition perspective, foregrounding the potential for listener agency and subjectivity in the perception of these multilayered harmonies.
2023. “Reverse Extensions and Multi-Layered Experiences of Harmony in Drake’s Harmonic Loops.” Current Musicology 109/110: 74–99. https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v109i.10139
ABSTRACT: Drake’s music features both lyrics and harmonies that often appear multilayered, ambiguous, and conflicted to listeners. Sometimes these multilayered harmonies are created through what I call “reverse extensions,” where the bass line moves one or more thirds below the root of the chord in a fixed harmonic loop. These reverse extensions can sometimes be heard as a “harmonic-bass divorce” (de Clercq 2019) in which the bass line moves independently from the harmonic layer. However, I argue that they often can also be heard as single integrated harmonies, and that these plural hearings draw on intra- and inter-textual memory to create multilayered harmonic experiences which help evoke the conflicted and ambivalent feelings that Drake’s lyrics are famous for.
The plural identities of these chords can be understood by adapting elementary concepts from jazz theory, in which extended chords can be mimicked by or substituted with “slash chords” that add a bass note below the base triad; for example, G/A (G major triad with A in the bass, or AGBD) sounds like Am11 (ACEGBD). This chord sometimes seems to convey a double function of both G and Am. Relationships like this create an “extension-related family” of chords which often easily substitute for one another in chord progressions. I argue that by enumerating possibilities for chord substitutions, and plural hearings of extended chords, reverse extensions are an “enactive music theory” which frames chord identity as a structure subjectively enacted by an individual, rather than an objective property inherent “the music itself.”
Hybrids Between Lyrics-Based Verse/Chorus Forms and Loop-Based EDM Processes
This topic emerged from a unit I’ve been teaching for several years about form in popular music. I don’t have any publications yet, but I have a couple of collaborations with student co-authors in the pipeline, and I hope to have some news to share soon!
Copyright Infringement and Forensic Musicology
The very first class I ever designed myself was about copyright and originality, and I’ve been thinking about this topic ever since. I’ve presented a paper called “‘Band of Beggars and Thieves’: Imitation, Recognition, and Creative Ownership in Heavy Metal Guitar Solos” at a couple of conferences, which overlaps with this topic, and I’m planning for it to form the basis for a book project in a few years. I’m also working with a student on a paper about statistical reasoning in copyright, and I recently presented a draft of it at the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Iowa. I don’t have anything published yet, but I have a couple of collaborations with student co-authors in the pipeline, and hope to be able to share it soon!
Music Theory Methods / Pedagogy
2025. “Inclusive, Student-Centered Keyboard Pedagogy.” Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy 9. https://engagingstudentsmusic.org/article/id/6975/
ABSTRACT: In this article, I discuss several ways in which keyboard pedagogy can be more inclusive. First, curricula can include more popular and world music, which represents a greater diversity of traditions in the classroom, and also creates more familiar access points for students without prior classical training. Second, keyboard pedagogy can be framed to help students develop and pursue their own interests. Third, assessments can be structured in a way that gives students more agency and flexibility to improve at their own pace. I describe a weekly multi-level musicianship challenge format which implements these principles to create student-centered keyboard pedagogy.
KEYWORDS: inclusivity, pedagogy, keyboard skills, curriculum, music theory