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
Matt Bribitzer-Stull
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
David Damschroder
Specialties
Fortepiano performance and repertoire; Theories of harmony (18th – 21st centuries); Music of the nineteenth century; Analysis of tonal music (Schenkerian emphasis)
Sumanth Gopinath
Specialties
Sound studies; Popular music; Musical hermeneutics; Music and politics; Avant-garde and experimental musics; Music after WWII; Music and globalization
Guerino Mazzola
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
Specialties
Music and Sound Studies; Philosophy and Intellectual History; Music of the African Diaspora; Cultural History and Ethnography; Global Modernisms
Charles Kronengold
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
Elliott Powell
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