A short consideration of the dueling dance parties at the Philadelphia Convention Center during the counting of votes for the 2020 presidential election. Analytical frameworks from popular music studies are used to consider the political implications of the uses of music on right and left.

Review Essay of Hamilton: An American Musical

An introduction to the analysis and interpretation of European classical music from 1827 to the present. The focus is on music of Europe, in particular of France, Germany, and Italy, but thanks to the vagaries of colonialism and imperialism we will also direct our attention towards countries where the musical traditions of Western Europe spread,…[Read more]

This seminar investigates musical performances of the past in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ranging from Anton Webern’s famous transcription of a Bach fugue to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, we will seek to explore how compositional practices in the twentieth century drew inspiration from a range of historical sources, and…[Read more]

Leonard Bernstein’s 1949 second symphony, subtitled “The Age of Anxiety,” is an exploration of post-war apathy and exhaustion at the dawn of McCarthyism. Examining the work both in its political context and also within the context of Bernstein’s beloved American symphonic tradition, I show how Bernstein flipped the triumphal musical rhetoric of…[Read more]