He is professor of music at the Ohio State University. He edited The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology (University of Rochester Press, 2004) and has published articles on Alban Berg, twelve-tone composition, film music, minimalist opera, and Frank Zappa. He was an American Musicological Society (AMS) 50 Dissertation Fellow, and won the AMS Alfred Einstein Award in 1996. His book Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction, a study of art music cultures in the phonographic age, will appear in spring 2010 (University of California Press).