The central theme of my musicological research is the conceptual history of music: How has music as a concept changed throughout history? In the past few years, I have thought, researched and written about this question within two areas each focusing on a musical culture:

The first area is the continuation of my PhD thesis, titled “The Music-World Relationship in Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century European Thought: Musical Modernity as Musical Subjectification.” In my thesis I explored manifestations of musical subjectification in European musical thought during the decades leading up to and following the year 1800. Drawing on methods in musical analysis, music history, intellectual history, and the philosophy of music, it examines shifts in the music-world relationship and the development of a modern notion of music through the otherization of the non-musical. The third chapter of my dissertation, titled “Beyond the Natural Greatness: The Musical Sublime Subjectified” has been accepted to be published in the Journal of 19th-Century Music. I am currently revising the other chapters of my dissertation for submission to scholarly journals.

In line with my interests in epoch-making shifts in music history, I am studying the works of one of the most influential recent Iranian composers: Hossein Alizadeh. In this area, I am examining ways in which Alizadeh’s music contributes to the formation of a new realist music-world relationship. This research, which is dependent on several methodologies drawing from musical analysis, intellectual history, social and cultural studies, as well as philosophy, also offers an analysis of some of the most recent compositional works in Iran’s music scene over the last five decades. My presentation on this topic at the 2021 Meeting of the Northwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Bellingham, Washington (online conference), titled “‘Raz-i Nuw’; Hossein Alizadeh and the Possibility of a Persian Musical Modernity,” won the Thelma B. Adamson Prize at the Pacific Northwest chapter conference of SEM. I am currently working on a longer version of this presentation for submission to scholarly journals.