I am a scholar and musician with interests and activities that revolve around two points of focus: experimental music, and the music of Indonesia, especially Central Javanese gamelan.
My primary research focus is contemporary art music in Indonesia, known there as musik kontemporer. My dissertation, which I completed in 2014 for the PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, presents a historical overview of the field as a whole. It examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to its distinctive profile, in which work that is grounded in or otherwise relates to traditional Indonesian musics is especially prominent. A second area of interest is the temporality of traditional Javanese gamelan music, which I initially explored in his MA thesis and am now returning to. My publications include a reflection on composing for gamelan in North America, in The World of Music, and a chapter on the sound exploration of the Balinese composer Pande Made Sukerta in the collected volume Performing Arts in Postmodern Bali.
I began my academic career studying composition at the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University (SFU), and then at Wesleyan University, where I completed my MA in 2001. After first encountering Javanese gamelan at SFU, I studied for twenty months in Indonesia, primarily in the old court city of Surakarta, Central Java. I have since joined the ranks of the leading non-Javanese performers of traditional Javanese music, performing regularly with groups in New York and Boston. From the beginning of my involvement with gamelan I have also engaged with it creatively. I have composed numerous works for gamelan, including a three-and-a-half hour performance/installation as my MA thesis project, an installation for virtual gamelan, and pieces for gamelan and other Asian instruments such as koto and dan bau. I have also worked to realize and perform pieces by Jessika Kenney, Nick Brooke, fellow members of the Vancouver ensemble Gamelan Madu Sari, Amit Gilutz, and Jesse Jones, and have collaborated with and performed pieces by some of Indonesia’s leading composers, including AL Suwardi, Pande Made Sukerta, the late I Wayan Sadra, and Michael Asmara. I am an original member of the Cornell Avant-Garde Ensemble (CAGE), an ensemble dedicated to freely improvised music founded in 2011.
As a faculty member in the Department of Music at Cornell University, I direct the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble and teach courses on Indonesian music.