Assistant Professor of Piano & Musicology · Director of Keyboard Studies
Old Dominion University · Norfolk, Virginia
Pianist-scholar working across musical performance, historical research, computational musicology, and human-centered AI.
About
I am a pianist-scholar whose research examines musical interpretation: how performers understand notation, how musical taste and judgment change over time, and how interpretive knowledge is taught, transmitted, and preserved. My work brings together performance, historical research, computational analysis, and human-centered AI.
I have appeared as a soloist and chamber musician across the United States, France, Morocco, Portugal, Moldova, and the United Kingdom, with performances at venues including the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the Cité de la Musique and Salle Cortot in Paris, and the Casa da Música in Porto.
A graduate of the École Normale de Musique de Paris and the Royal College of Music in London, I hold a Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance from the University of Southern California. I am Assistant Professor of Piano and Musicology and Director of Keyboard Studies at Old Dominion University.
My research examines musical interpretation across three related settings: recorded performance, pedagogy and transmission, and musical institutions. Current projects range from computational analysis of more than a century of recorded piano performance to Alfred Cortot’s teaching at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and the history of Franco-Moroccan conservatory culture.
My current computational research uses the century-long archive of recorded piano performance to investigate musical interpretation itself: how performers interpret notation, how standards of musical taste and judgment change over time, and how successive generations understand the same works differently. At the center of the project is a corpus of nearly 5,000 performances of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas by sixty-nine pianists.
More than 3,600 performances have been transcribed into symbolic form and linked to digital scores and structural annotations. The research combines computational performance analysis with historical listening and asks what AI models actually learn about musical performance, how that knowledge can be evaluated, and where computational representations fail to capture musically meaningful distinctions.
This project examines Cortot’s pedagogical approach to interpretation, particularly his use of poetic, symbolic, and metaphorical language to communicate musical ideas. It considers the imaginative and often highly subjective ways in which he characterizes works, passages, and interpretive problems, and places this approach within the Symbolist and Wagnerian intellectual culture that shaped his thinking.
“Revivre le cours: Alfred Cortot, archives pédagogiques et transmission interprétative sur le Steinway 1907”
This project examines conservatory culture and Franco-Moroccan musical exchange from the Protectorate period to the present. Through archival research and interviews in Morocco and France, I study how French models of musical training were transmitted, adapted, and reshaped within Moroccan musical institutions.
Music + AI Research Group at ODU
I lead an interdisciplinary undergraduate research group in computational musicology and human-centered AI. The group currently includes students in both Music Performance and Computer Science.
At Old Dominion University, I direct keyboard studies and teach applied piano, music history, and pedagogy at the undergraduate and graduate levels. My courses include Music and Ideas, Music in the Romantic Era, Music of the 20th Century to the Present, Applied Music Literature, and Applied Music Pedagogy.
I also mentor interdisciplinary undergraduate research in computational musicology and human-centered AI.
I also teach online through ArtistWorks in the course “Piano with Zachary Deak.”
Previously, I taught at Cal State University, Los Angeles and Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo.