I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at New York University in the Department of Music in the Graduate School of Arts and Science. For the past several years, I have been conducting research towards writing my dissertation, in 1995 through the support of an NYU Dean's Dissertation Fellowship, and since then while holding down a freelance job. I intend to finish the dissertation and defend it in Spring 2001.
I entered NYU as a Master's candidate in Fall of 1988, after living and working for four years in Cleveland, Ohio. This was quite a change from my four very intense years at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where I earned a B.Mus. in Piano Performance, with a minor in Music History. I finally got the M.A. from NYU in Fall of 1991 (after completing the course work and my comprehensive exams more than a year before), and then entered the Ph.D. program.
I began research on my dissertation in Fall 1991. Then my topic was "The Piano Quartet in Vienna, 1780-1800." But after I spent a year in Germany and Austria on a Deutcher Akademischer Austauschdienst fellowship doing research in archives and libraries, I changed the title to "The Piano Quartet and Quintet in Vienna, 1780-1810", because I realized that stopping at 1800 would be arbitrary and would omit quite a few really interesting pieces. Since I returned in the summer of 1993, I've been working with the materials I collected in Germany, and drafting some of the early chapters.
Over the past several semesters, I've been working on scoring up major sections of about three dozen of the works I've found as the basis for the large chapter of stylistic analysis which is at the heart of my dissertation. I'm hoping that next fall I'll get to work on all the good stuff about genre, gender roles in chamber music, Mozart's role as a model, etc. Good stuff!
If you are interested in performing any of a number of interesting works for piano quartet and quintet (with strings as well as with winds) by composers such as Förster, Hoffmeister, Brandl, Eberl, Clement, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Starke, Triebensee, Albrechtsberger, Mederitsch, Struck, Krommer, Storace, Kozeluch, Bengraf, Dussek, Biron, and others, let me know at the e-mail address below. I would be thrilled to have my research result in performances of these little-known works. And if you haven't even heard of most of these composers, don't worry -- neither had I until I started my research!
My projects include:
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