Assistant Professor of Piano & Musicology · Director of Keyboard Studies
Old Dominion University · Norfolk, Virginia
Pianist-scholar working across musical performance, historical research, and computational musicology.
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 asks how musical interpretation becomes history: how performers make artistic choices, how those choices circulate through recordings and pedagogy, and how institutions shape what is taught and preserved. Working across music history, performance studies, archival research, and computational musicology, I am particularly interested in interpretation as a form of knowledge and in the ways musical traditions are transmitted and transformed over time.
Current projects range from the history of recorded piano performance to Alfred Cortot’s pedagogy at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and the history of musical education and cultural exchange in Morocco.
The Interpreted Canon traces how Beethoven’s piano sonatas were reshaped in performance across more than a century of recording. Combining historical research and computational analysis, it examines changing ideas of fidelity, artistic freedom, individuality, and tradition.
This project examines Cortot’s pedagogy of interpretation, with particular attention to the poetic, symbolic, and metaphorical language through which he communicated musical ideas. It explores the imaginative and often highly subjective ways he characterized works, passages, and interpretive problems, and asks what this language reveals about his understanding of musical interpretation and the relationship between verbal imagery and performance.
“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
I lead an interdisciplinary undergraduate research group exploring computational approaches to music and musical performance, bringing together students in 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 music and computation.
Through ArtistWorks, I teach the online course “Piano with Zachary Deak.”
Previously, I taught at Cal State University, Los Angeles and Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo.