The primary focus of my research is contemporary art music in Indonesia, there called musik kontemporer. To date, my publications on this topic examine the work of the first generation of traditionally-based composers associated with the conservatory in Surakarta. What first caught my attention in this work was the centrality of sound exploration. I write about that, but I also examine its mostly independent relationship to Western musical modernism, its more substantial grounding gamelan and other Indonesian traditions, and the enduring commitment of these composers to those traditions.

My dissertation presents an overview of musik kontemporer as a whole, from its relationshp to its early twentieth-century prehistory through to the first decade of the twenty-first. It accounts for how musik kontemporer came by its distinctive profile, in which traditionally-based composers have been as prominent as their Western-oriented peers, nearly all Western-oriented composers have at least in part “gone nativist,” and eclecticism increasingly abounds. Moving forward, I intend to turn my attention to the Western-oriented side of Indonesian art music composition. Specifically, I plan to examine the mid-twentieth-century career of Amir Pasaribu, as the first step of a broader inquiry into the relationship between aesthetic and other forms of authority, including political authoritarianism.

My work on musik kontemporer led to my co-editing, with Gavin S. K. Lee, a special issue of Twentieth-Century Music on global musical modernisms (2023). It also relates to a broader concern with music in modernity, an implicit theme of the conference Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music I co-organized with Andrew McGraw, and of the resulting edited volume (2022), and a concern I explore through teaching courses on the wide range of music in and of Indonesia and East Asia. A much more particular interest is the temporality of Javanese gamelan music, a topic I explored in my MA thesis to which I am now returning through an examinination of the concept of hypermeter.