Recent Updates
Presentation at SEM
I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
This recording was made by Arthur Pryor’s Band on April 25, 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War. Courtesy of the Collection of Recorded Sound, Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco. Digitized by Ryan Gourley.
Major Research Projects
Sounding Russian Manchuria: Musical Circulation and Imperial Imagination
My dissertation, Sounding Russian Manchuria: Musical Circulation and Imperial Imagination, critically examines the musical legacy of Russian imperial expansion in Northeast Asia at the turn of the 20th century. The project contends that musical circulation fueled Russian imperialism in the Far East, shaping and reshaping the imagination of Manchuria as a colonial dependency amidst war and violent social upheaval in the region. Chapters investigate the development of the Russian gramophone industry during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), the hit recordings made in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution (1911-12), the diaries of musicians who migrated to Manchuria during the Russian Civil War, and the musical tours that occurred during the Sino-Soviet War (1929) and the Imperial Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931). Through a detailed examination of archival materials and ethnographic interviews, the dissertation prompts new understandings of imperial subjectivity and belonging through a distinctly musical lens.
Frontline Frequencies: Music, Technology, & Imperial Power in the Russo-Japanese War
As the first in-depth study of music and the Russo-Japanese War, this book project reconceptualizes the history of sound recording as one that was truly global in scale – rooted in imperial conflict and far-reaching networks of media circulation. Chapters delve into the ways that musicians, soldiers, and gramophone companies creatively reimagined the purpose and possibilities of emergent media technologies.
Publications
“Soviet Jazz on American Vinyl: Consuming Diasporic Jazz at Home” in The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies, edited by Bruce Johnson, Adam Havas, and David Horn. Routledge Press. 2024.
“A Discography of Basile Kibalchich” in Временник Зубовского института. Saint-Petersburg. No. 2 (45). 2024. pp. 205-224. Read more about this discography project here.
Review of Bone Music by Stephen Coates, in Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal (Solicited, Forthcoming).
Work in Progress
“Petro-Mobility and Phonographic Modernity on the Central Asian Steppe” (Solicited for Cultural Politics)
“Immersive Realism: Sound Recording and American Imagination during the Russo-Japanese War”
“Resonances of Railway Imperialism: Music and Conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway”
Program for the concert of Feodor Chaliapin at the American Theatre in Harbin, Manchuria. 19 March 1936. Scan courtesy of the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco.