Check out this story about GC Professor Poundie Burstein’s new book, Journeys Through Galant Expositions: How to Analyze 18th Century Music Using the Right Metaphors
Archive | Music Theory Research Highlights

GC Student Michèle Duguay Wins SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship
Congratulations to GC Music Theory student, Michèle Duguay, who has been awarded an SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship for work on her dissertation, “Gendering the Virtual Space: Sonic Femininities and Masculinities in Contemporary Top 40 Music.” BIO Michèle Duguay (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also completed a […]

GC Student Lina Tabak wins SMT 2020 Student Presentation Award
Lina Sofia Tabak is the recipient of the 2020 SMT Student Presentation Award for her paper “Pulse Dissonance in Colombian Currulao,” which is a result of her undergraduate thesis titled, “Rhythmic and Metrical Practices in Two Colombian Dance Genres.” Lina is currently a second-year PhD student in music theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. She […]

The Story Behind GC Professor Joe Straus’s 2020 Wallace Berry Award
Read about Professor Joe Straus’s groundbreaking work for which he was awarded the 2020 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory for his book Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability: https://gc.cuny.edu/News/All-News/Detail?id=58385

GC Professor Mark Spicer awarded SMT’s Outstanding Publication Award
Congratulations to GC Professor Mark Spicer, who has been awarded this year’s Outstanding Publication Award by the Society for Music Theory! The recipient of this year’s Outstanding Publication Award examines the harmonies of pop and rock music. Through a plethora of meticulous transcriptions and analyses, the article outlines the ways in which chord inversions, repeating […]

GC Professor Joseph Straus Awarded 2020 Wallace Berry Award by SMT
Congratulations to GC Distinguished Professor Joseph Straus, who has been awarded the 2020 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory! This year’s Wallace Berry Award honors a book that is breathtaking in its ambition, scope, and achievement. Drawing on multiple tropes of disability representation, this book explores the conditions by which modernist music […]

Kathryn Straker to present at AMS/SMT 2020 on November 14th
GC student Kathryn Straker to present a paper entitled “At Home with the Exotic: The Celtic and the Oriental as Mutual Otherworlds in British Psychedelia” at the upcoming AMS/SMT 2020 on November 14th. Congrats, Kathryn! About: Appropriations from Near Eastern music are a well-known psychedelic signifier in 1960s folk and rock, and in this paper […]

Greg Hartmann to present at 2020 SMT conference
GC student Greg Hartmann to present a paper entitled “Expanding Parsimony to Microtonal Music” in the upcoming 2020 Society for Music Theory conference. This presentation explores how expanding the definition of parsimony enables us to find parsimonious relationships such as P, L, and R in microtonal music of many different cardinalities.

Ph.D. candidate Stephen Gomez-Peck to present at 2020 Joint Meeting of the SMT and the AMS
Music theory Ph.D. candidate Stephen Gomez-Peck to present a paper entitled “(Hyper)metrical Games in Schubert’s Early Piano Sonatas”, at the upcoming 2020 Joint Meeting of the SMT and the AMS. About: While scholars have long recognized and engaged with rhythmic and metric virtuosity and playfulness in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, there is little such […]

Lina Sofia Tabak presents “Pulse Dissonance in Colombian Currulao” at the 2020 SMT conference
GC student Lina Sofia Tabak presents “Pulse Dissonance in Colombian Currulao” at the 2020 Society for Music Theory conference. The paper studies certain complex rhythmic patterns in the Pacific-coastal genre which are arguably polymetric. She argues that these patterns can be conceptualized using an altered version of Harald Krebs’s metrical dissonance theory, adding a […]

GC Professor Johanna Devaney Gives Keynote Talk at International Conference
Congratulations to Dr. Johanna Devaney, who will be giving one of the keynote talks at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval conference this week. The talk will reflect on how musical performance has been conceived of and studied in the music information retrieval community and will suggest some directions for future research. The talk […]

Congratulations to Philip Ewell!
The music department is pleased and proud to announce that theory faculty member Philip Ewell has been selected to receive the Graduate Center Award for Excellence in Mentoring. Ewell is also on the music theory faculty of Hunter College. The award is due in no small part to the enthusiasm Ewell has generated from […]