Roger Moseley
Cornell University, Music, Faculty Member
- Roger Moseley’s recent research focuses on intersections between keyboard music, digital games, and the diverse ways ... moreRoger Moseley’s recent research focuses on intersections between keyboard music, digital games, and the diverse ways in which they can be played. In 2017, his first book, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo, received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, which recognizes “a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar beyond the early stages of his or her career.” Published under a Creative Commons license by the University of California Press and featuring audiovisual materials including footage of digital games and music by Mozart, Beethoven, Bizet, Louis Couperin, and others recorded by Moseley and his Cornell colleagues Malcolm Bilson, Ariana Kim, Shin Hwang, and Matthew Hall, the book is available here as a free download in a variety of formats.
Moseley has published essays on topics including the music of Brahms (on which he wrote his PhD dissertation), Chopin, Mozart, eighteenth-century keyboard improvisation, Guitar Hero, and media archaeology. He is also active as a collaborative pianist on modern and historical instruments. In 2017, he performed Mozart's Keyboard Concerto in F, K. 459, on fortepiano with the Cornell Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Chris Younghoon Kim.
Moseley is currently working on his second book, Romantic Artifacts: The Technological Disclosure of Nineteenth-Century Music, which subjects the songs of Schubert, the piano music of Chopin, the chamber music of Fauré, and the orchestral music of Brahms to media-theoretical and music-analytical scrutiny.
At Cornell, Moseley is director of the new Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, which gathers together keyboard instruments from clavichords to Moog synthesizers and makes them available for scholarship, performance, and pedagogy via festivals, conferences, reading groups, and other programs.
Working with Postdoctoral Associate in Computational Music Theory Pedagogy Mark Gotham, Moseley leads the Department of Music’s current Active Learning Initiative project, which aims to transform the study of theory and musicianship via the integration of digital keyboards as networked communication devices as well as musical instruments.
In 2017–18, Moseley was the recipient of a Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship. He is currently a member of the CIVIC Research Collaborative in Media Studies.
Moseley regularly teaches undergraduate courses in music history, culture, theory, materials, techniques, and performance. His other course offerings include Music and Digital Gameplay and Thinking Media, a new interdisciplinary course to be taught in Spring 2019 that will feature guest faculty from across the university.
Moseley’s graduate seminars have focused on ludomusicology (the study of music, games, and play, a scholarly field that his work helped establish), nineteenth-century music and its technological mediation, keyboard cultures and techniques, historical improvisation, virtuosity, and the music of Schubert. He has worked closely with graduate students on dissertations and publications addressing topics ranging from nineteenth-century technologies of musical stenography, representations of the devil on the Parisian stage, and Czerny‘s transcriptions of Beethoven to Nintendo’s Game & Watch and Yamaha’s Vocaloid Keyboard.
After completing his PhD at UC Berkeley, Moseley held a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford, during which he earned an MMus with Distinction in Collaborative Piano from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Prior to his arrival at Cornell in 2010, he lectured in music history and theory at the University of Chicago.edit
Winner of the 2017 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society, recognizing a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar who is past the early stages of his or her career. How do keyboards make music... more
Winner of the 2017 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society, recognizing a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar who is past the early stages of his or her career.
How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.
“Keys to Play is full of novel ideas, provocative observations, and brilliant aperçus. Whether our interests lie in audiovisual media, aesthetics, performance, improvisation, compositional technique, notation, theory, or historiography, Moseley shows us how much the field at large has to gain from taking play seriously. In a word: stunning.” —ALEXANDER REHDING, Harvard University
“Moseley’s game-changing book puts a new and versatile set of tools at our disposal. Wonderfully allusive and erudite, Keys to Play will open new horizons for music scholars of all kinds.” —ELISABETH LE GUIN, University of California, Los Angeles
"A dazzling and daring book: an intellectual symphony, a virtuosic boss run, a vigorous expedition in media-musical archaeology, and an exquisite love letter to the vitality of interdisciplinary play.” —WILLIAM CHENG, author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination
“Keys to Play offers a new approach to central episodes in the narrative of European art music refracted through histories of the keyboard, digital games, and improvisation. It is at once provocative, bracing and, yes, profoundly playful.” —BENJAMIN WALTON, University of Cambridge
How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.
“Keys to Play is full of novel ideas, provocative observations, and brilliant aperçus. Whether our interests lie in audiovisual media, aesthetics, performance, improvisation, compositional technique, notation, theory, or historiography, Moseley shows us how much the field at large has to gain from taking play seriously. In a word: stunning.” —ALEXANDER REHDING, Harvard University
“Moseley’s game-changing book puts a new and versatile set of tools at our disposal. Wonderfully allusive and erudite, Keys to Play will open new horizons for music scholars of all kinds.” —ELISABETH LE GUIN, University of California, Los Angeles
"A dazzling and daring book: an intellectual symphony, a virtuosic boss run, a vigorous expedition in media-musical archaeology, and an exquisite love letter to the vitality of interdisciplinary play.” —WILLIAM CHENG, author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination
“Keys to Play offers a new approach to central episodes in the narrative of European art music refracted through histories of the keyboard, digital games, and improvisation. It is at once provocative, bracing and, yes, profoundly playful.” —BENJAMIN WALTON, University of Cambridge
Research Interests:
Winner of the 2017 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society, recognizing a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar who is past the early stages of his or her career. How do keyboards make music... more
Winner of the 2017 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society, recognizing a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar who is past the early stages of his or her career.
How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.
“Keys to Play is full of novel ideas, provocative observations, and brilliant aperçus. Whether our interests lie in audiovisual media, aesthetics, performance, improvisation, compositional technique, notation, theory, or historiography, Moseley shows us how much the field at large has to gain from taking play seriously. In a word: stunning.” —ALEXANDER REHDING, Harvard University
“Moseley’s game-changing book puts a new and versatile set of tools at our disposal. Wonderfully allusive and erudite, Keys to Play will open new horizons for music scholars of all kinds.” —ELISABETH LE GUIN, University of California, Los Angeles
"A dazzling and daring book: an intellectual symphony, a virtuosic boss run, a vigorous expedition in media-musical archaeology, and an exquisite love letter to the vitality of interdisciplinary play.” —WILLIAM CHENG, author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination
“Keys to Play offers a new approach to central episodes in the narrative of European art music refracted through histories of the keyboard, digital games, and improvisation. It is at once provocative, bracing and, yes, profoundly playful.” —BENJAMIN WALTON, University of Cambridge
How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.
“Keys to Play is full of novel ideas, provocative observations, and brilliant aperçus. Whether our interests lie in audiovisual media, aesthetics, performance, improvisation, compositional technique, notation, theory, or historiography, Moseley shows us how much the field at large has to gain from taking play seriously. In a word: stunning.” —ALEXANDER REHDING, Harvard University
“Moseley’s game-changing book puts a new and versatile set of tools at our disposal. Wonderfully allusive and erudite, Keys to Play will open new horizons for music scholars of all kinds.” —ELISABETH LE GUIN, University of California, Los Angeles
"A dazzling and daring book: an intellectual symphony, a virtuosic boss run, a vigorous expedition in media-musical archaeology, and an exquisite love letter to the vitality of interdisciplinary play.” —WILLIAM CHENG, author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination
“Keys to Play offers a new approach to central episodes in the narrative of European art music refracted through histories of the keyboard, digital games, and improvisation. It is at once provocative, bracing and, yes, profoundly playful.” —BENJAMIN WALTON, University of Cambridge
Research Interests:
The ambiguity of Chopin’s music and its amenability to reinvention help account for its enduring appeal to pianists, composers, and critics. This article examines the conditions under which such ambiguity has taken shape on the page and... more
The ambiguity of Chopin’s music and its amenability to reinvention help account for its enduring appeal to pianists, composers, and critics. This article examines the conditions under which such ambiguity has taken shape on the page and at the piano. Just as curves become jagged—or “aliased”—when represented by the grid of discrete pixels that form digital displays, so have the contours of Chopin’s music been both veiled and disclosed by the straight lines that define the staff and the keyboard. Despite the term’s contemporary ring, the issues raised and reflected by aliasing are rooted in a set of nineteenth-century dichotomies concerning the discrete and the continuous, artifice and nature, instruments and bodies, virtuosity and poetry, machines and voices, and constraints and liberties, all of which Chopin’s music was heard both to invoke and to elude. By way of recordings and transcriptions by Leopold Godowsky, Marc-André Hamelin, Josef Lhévinne, Vladimir de Pachmann, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and Arthur Rubinstein, the article presents various instances of aliasing and attempts to mitigate it via a range of compositional, pianistic, and cultural techniques that reveal how aliases can produce ambiguity by calling the very distinction between identity and difference into question.
Research Interests:
From “Discrete/Continuous: Music and Media Theory after Kittler,” a colloquy convened by Alexander Rehding.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Relating evidence from the mythological to the contemporary in both historical and media-archaeological registers, this article explores how techniques of sonic generation and representation shuttled between what might be defined as... more
Relating evidence from the mythological to the contemporary in both historical and media-archaeological registers, this article explores how techniques of sonic generation and representation shuttled between what might be defined as digital and analog domains long before the terms acquired their present meanings—and became locked in a binary opposition—over the latter half of the twentieth century. It proposes that such techniques be conceptualized via the “digital analogy,” a critical strategy that accounts for the nesting of techno-musical configurations. While the scope of digital analogies is expansive, the focus here falls on a particular interface and mode of engagement. The interface is the keyboard; the mode of engagement is the play, both ludic and musical, that the keyboard affords. Operations at the keyboard have been integral to ludic communication and computation as well as to the practices of composition, performance, and improvisation. To map out this genealogy and to show how it continues to inform loci of musical play from sound art to digital games, the article draws on an array of critical and theoretical texts including Friedrich Kittler’s media analyses, Vilém Flusser’s writings on technology, and post-Foucauldian discourses on cultural techniques.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Winner of the 2008 Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association for a distinguished article by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career. A comparison of the 1854 and 1891 versions of the Piano Trio in B, op. 8,... more
Winner of the 2008 Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association for a distinguished article by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career.
A comparison of the 1854 and 1891 versions of the Piano Trio in B, op. 8, explores how musical allusion can be interpreted to convey Johannes Brahms’s attitudes to critics, friends, other composers and his own past. The young Brahms’s attachment to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary alter ego Johannes Kreisler helps explain the extent to which the music of others makes itself heard in the first version of the trio. Changing standards of criticism affected the nature and scope of Brahms’s revision, which expunged perceived allusions; the older Brahms’s more detached compositional approach shared elements with Heinrich Schenker’s analytical perspective. There are also parallels between Brahms’s excisions and the surgical innovations of his friend and musical ally Theodor Billroth. Both Brahms and Billroth were engaged with the removal of foreign bodies in order to preserve organic integrity, but traces of others – and of the past – persist throughout the revised trio.
A comparison of the 1854 and 1891 versions of the Piano Trio in B, op. 8, explores how musical allusion can be interpreted to convey Johannes Brahms’s attitudes to critics, friends, other composers and his own past. The young Brahms’s attachment to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary alter ego Johannes Kreisler helps explain the extent to which the music of others makes itself heard in the first version of the trio. Changing standards of criticism affected the nature and scope of Brahms’s revision, which expunged perceived allusions; the older Brahms’s more detached compositional approach shared elements with Heinrich Schenker’s analytical perspective. There are also parallels between Brahms’s excisions and the surgical innovations of his friend and musical ally Theodor Billroth. Both Brahms and Billroth were engaged with the removal of foreign bodies in order to preserve organic integrity, but traces of others – and of the past – persist throughout the revised trio.