Music Theory

Music theory faculty members possess expertise in current methodologies of analysis, history of theory, and pedagogy. Our program offers instruction in counterpoint, Schenkerian analysis, 20th-century theory, the history of music theory, pedagogy, and a variety of specialized topics.

The theory division supports all programs at the School of Music through coursework and expertise at every degree level. Undergraduate students may focus their studies in music theory with the bachelor of arts with academic emphasis, while the graduate programs in theory offer professional training for careers in teaching and scholarship.

Degrees

Music Theory Faculty

Middle-aged white man with short brown hair

Matt Bribitzer-Stull

he/him/his
Professor Theory

Specialties

Richard Strauss; music theory; German Romantic music traditions; french horn; Richard Wagner; theory pedagogy; nineteenth-century theory and analysis; musical form and tonal structure; musical associativity; chromatic harmony; queer theory and subjectivity

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David Damschroder

Professor Theory

Specialties

Fortepiano performance and repertoire; Theories of harmony (18th – 21st centuries); Music of the nineteenth century; Analysis of tonal music (Schenkerian emphasis)

image of a South Asian American cis-man with short hair and a light beard, wearing a zipped-up black jacket.

Sumanth Gopinath

he/him/his
Associate Professor Theory

Specialties

Sound studies; Popular music; Musical hermeneutics; Music and politics; Avant-garde and experimental musics; Music after WWII; Music and globalization

Guerio Mazzola with painting by jakob Sollberger

Guerino Mazzola

Professor Creativity, Improvisation, and Mathematical Music Theory

Specialties

Classical symbolic thinking in music and performance theory; Transformational theory using category theory; Gestures in music; Software for musical analysis, composition, and performance; Free jazz

Faculty in Other Departments

Michael Gallope

Michael Gallope

he / him
Affiliate Faculty

Specialties

Music and Sound Studies; Philosophy and Intellectual History; Music of the African Diaspora; Cultural History and Ethnography; Global Modernisms

photo of Charles Kronengold by Mark Nye

Charles Kronengold

he/him

Specialties

20th- and 21st-century music (including musics of the African Diaspora, Western art music, popular music of the Americas, experimental musics and avant gardes, electronic dance music); film and audiovisual media; aesthetics (especially in relation to ethics); poetry and poetics; comparative modernisms; theories of genre

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Elliott Powell

He/him/his

Specialties

American popular music and culture; Comparative and relational race studies; Feminist and queer studies; Afro-Asian studies; Black cultural studies; Afro-diasporic popular music; Inter-/cross-cultural music making; Sound studies