Collaborative Scholarship in Musical Symbolism
Advanced Studies
A selective, yearlong one-to-one research partnership for professional musicians, scholars, conductors, composers, university faculty, serious private teachers, and exceptionally prepared students.
Bach and Beethoven • Musical symbolism • Original inquiry • Application-based
Explore the Research PathwaysBeyond the established conversation
Pioneering Studies
Advanced Studies begins with the possibility that—even after decades of performance, teaching, analysis, and historical study—works such as Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven’s Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata contain hidden dimensions of meaning that remain largely unexplored.
My research suggests that often overlooked details about the construction of many classical masterworks coalesce to reveal deliberately organized symbolic structures, the sum of which is to advance tonal music into the category of language, and therefore transform certain pieces of music into literature.
A new scholarly partnership
Research shaped around your professional questions
The implications of this work may open entirely new branches of scholarship, performance, pedagogy, analysis, and composition. Their eventual range is, at present, impossible to estimate.
In this partnership, you'll develop inquiry that serves your work as a performer, conductor, scholar, educator, theorist, or composer—whether the outcome is a lecture, article, book, course, performance project, composition, or an entirely new direction of study.
The Symbolism learning paths
Enter the method through the cornerstone courses
Accomplished musicians who are new to these concepts are encouraged to begin with the symbolism pathways in the Well-Tempered Clavier, FĂĽr Elise, and Moonlight Sonata. Each offers a structured encounter with the evidence, vocabulary, and habits of inquiry that Advanced Studies later makes collaborative and personal.
Focused entry point
Beethoven’s Für Elise
Examine how familiar gestures and underappreciated details may form a deliberate symbolic construction central to the work’s identity and meaning.
Expanded Beethoven inquiry
Moonlight Sonata
Explore how formal design, historical context, biography, and symbolic structure converge across a larger musical architecture to open the meaning - and explain the unusual design of - Moonlight Sonata.
Long-form foundation
Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier
This collection is the deepest foundation in the symbolic musical language studied by Beethoven, the "Rosetta Stone" of musical symbolism.Â
Where the inquiry can lead
A year of study shaped around serious professional use
The work is tailored to the participant’s field, existing expertise, and intended contribution.
Performance and conducting
Reconsider the meaning of - and therefore the artistic interpretation of - pieces likely to contain symbolic meaning in light of what's revealed in the cornerstone courses and more.
Musicology and scholarship
Form and test original hypotheses, compare evidence across sources and repertoire, and develop findings toward lectures, articles, books, or other scholarly communication.
Pedagogy and curriculum
Create new ways to teach familiar repertoire, connect analysis with interpretation, and begin to introduce your students to music as a structured language capable of literary meaning.
Composition and theory
Study symbolic construction as a compositional resource, examine its relationship to tonal language, and apply discoveries through analysis, arranging, or original creative work.
Selective yearlong enrollment
Advanced Studies at Exact Notes
Yearlong one-to-one collaborative scholarship: $25,000
Here the inquiry opened by the cornerstone courses becomes genuinely collaborative, personal, and tailored to your particular professional uses and goals. Admission is based on preparation, the quality and fit of the proposed inquiry, and availability.
Please review the preparation pathways and examples of possible work above, then reach out to begin a substantive conversation about your background, your questions, and what this program might make possible.
