His research interests include the Italian madrigal, the relationship between music and language in the early modern period, early opera, and Renaissance theories of cognition and sense perception. He is the author of Canoni ad Enigmi: Pier Francesco Valentini e l’artificio canonico nella prima meta del Seicento (Rome, 1995), and Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2009), which won the 2010 Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. He received his PhD from Duke University and a degree in musicology from University of Pavia, Italy.