2023 AMS/NYU Lecture

Clifton Boyd (he/him) is a music theorist and scholar-activist whose research explores themes of (racial) identity, politics, and social justice in American popular music. His book project, Keep It Barbershop: Stylistic Preservation and Whiteness in the Barbershop Harmony Society, demonstrates how nostalgia-fueled efforts toward musical and cultural preservation can perpetuate racial injustice. Combining critical race studies and music theory, this work furnishes new understandings of whiteness, barbershop as a racialized musical practice, and vernacular music theory. His research on music and politics also extends beyond the U.S. context: he is in the preliminary stages of a research project on how African immigrants in Italy negotiate questions of race, nationality, and citizenship through contemporary popular music. He specializes in several subfields of music-analytical research, including nineteenth-century chamber music, minimalist music, and musical meter.

Boyd’s essays and articles appear or are forthcoming in Music Theory and Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, Theory and Practice, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as the edited collections The Oxford Handbook for Public Music Theory and Being #BlackintheIvory: Contending with Racism in the American University. His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Boyd is also active in anti-racism and social-justice efforts in music studies: in 2017, he founded Project Spectrum, a graduate student–led coalition committed to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in music academia. As chair, he oversaw the organization of their inaugural national symposium, “Diversifying Music Academia: Strengthening the Pipeline” (2018). On behalf of Project Spectrum, he is twice a recipient of the Sphinx Organization’s MPower Artist Grant. In 2021, he was invited to represent the Society of Music Theory for the American Council of Learned Societies’ Intention Foundry, an initiative that aims to accelerate equity, inclusion, and structural change in the academy. He currently serves on the American Musicological Society’s Committee on Cultural Diversity and has served on the Society for Music Theory’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity.

Sarah Louden is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Music and the Director for the Music Theory and History Program. She holds a Ph.D. in music theory from the University of Buffalo SUNY, a Masters in Music Theory from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a Bachelors in Music Performance from Concordia College Moorhead.

Her research explores the cognitive effects of multisensory perception on a broad range of musical topics including multimedia and contemporary music analysis, music theory pedagogy, classroom accessibility, stage performance, digital technology and virtual reality. Dr. Louden’s dissertation, entitled “Cross-Sensory Perception in Music and Visual Media: A Neuro-Cognitive Approach to Cross-Domain Mapping in Multimedia,” received the distinguished dissertation award from the University of Buffalo in 2018. Her recent publication, “Sound-Induced Visual Illusion in Film,” was published as a chapter in Music in Action Film: Sounds Like Action! Her 2020 national Society for Music Theory presentation looked at crossmodal applications to accessibility and universal design in the music theory classroom.

I compose in acoustic and computer-driven media. Many of my mixed music (computer +traditional instrument) works explore interactive dsp in which the computer is responsive to location and to the player’s idiosyncracies of timbre and tuning. These pieces are simultaneously instruments, compositions, and structures that allow delimited free responses and interplay between the computer performer, the computer, and the instrumentalist. I have composed a handful of works for high density loudspeaker arrays up to 136 channels – a new domain–arguably an interface even–in electroacoustic music in which the exponential expansion of spatial information enables a qualitative transformation of musical and sonic articulative possibilities. Writing music that changes listeners through the listening is a goal of mine. Compositional interests include micro-timbre, texture, tuning, and, spatialization.

I value collaborative work, and have created new music with/for NYC performers, and others, including Marilyn Nonken, Margaret Lancaster, Ivan Goff, Maja Cerar, String Noise, TimeTable Percussion, Sarah Plum, Abbie Conant, loadbang, Jane Rigler, and Marianne Gythfeldt. I have also published theoretical work on electroacoustic and avant-garde musics that focus on the significance of contingent or indirectly perceived qualities in musics. Articles appear in The Computer Music Journal, Organized Sound, Array, and Perspectives of New Music. Topics include point of view in abstract and representational electronic musics; spatialization as interpretive practice and ontologically; and ethics of digital humanities’ archival practices. Teaching and research interests include the impact of the gendered world on women composing in general, and working with digital sound specifically.

My music appears on empreintes DIGITALes, NEUMA, Centaur, World-Edition, Capstone, Innova, and Everglade labels. Reviews cite my “visionary sound collages” (Chain DLK USA, Reviews).Prizes have come from the Bourges, Prix Ars, and Pierre Schaeffer competitions, the Seattle Arts Commission, ICMA, and the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell Foundation, and the NEA.

SoundCloud

Adem Merter Birson specializes in the history and analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western art music and classical Turkish music. His research in Western music deals with the relationship between chromaticism and form in the music of Joseph Haydn, and his work has been published in HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America (2014, 2020). Additional interests include exoticism, genre/cultural hybridity, topic theory and galant schemata of the Italian partimento tradition. A dedicated teacher, Dr. Birson has published on the use of historical style composition in the music theory classroom in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy Online (2017), and he is the recipient of the Graduate Teaching as Research/Teagle Fellowship from the Cornell University Center for Teaching Excellence (2012–13). He serves as Secretary for the Haydn Society of North America.

Dr. Birson’s research on classical Turkish music deals with identity, modal theory (makam), performance ensembles, and religious mysticism in the Ottoman tradition. He is the recipient of such grants as the Critical Language Scholarship (US Department of State) and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Mario Einaudi Center for European Studies). He has presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology and Society for Music Theory and has published in Rast Journal of Musicology (2016) and SMT-V, the Society for Music Theory’s online video journal (2021). Turkish music plays a role in his teaching, as he has discussed the use of Turkish rhythms in the aural skills classroom in Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy (2021). As a performer of the Turkish lute (oud), Dr. Birson has studied with virtuoso performers like Necati Çelik, Sedat Oytun, Yurdal Tokcan, and Alper Karaağaçlı. He performs with the ancient world music ensemble, Eurasia Consort.

Adem Merter Birson is a graduate of Cornell University and the Aaron Copland School of Music at CUNY Queens College. He has recently worked as Assistant Professor/Director of the Conservatory at Ipek University, in Ankara, Turkey. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Theory at both NYU Steinhardt and Hofstra University.

Panayotis Mavromatis received his B.A. and M.A. in Mathematics from Cambridge University in England, his M.A. in Physics from Boston University, and his Ph.D. in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music. His research integrates cognitive science, linguistics and computer science into traditional music disciplines, including Schenkerian theory, history of theory, and post-tonal theory. His current work focuses on the mathematical modeling of musical structure, as well as the computational modeling of musical skill and its acquisition. In one line of research, he developed a computational model of melody in modern Greek church chant and explored its cognitive implications. In another line of research, he pursues the educational applications of his theoretical work using Intelligent Tutoring Systems.