Theory Area Presentation: Scott Murphy

Abstract: 

Many of the pitch-based conventions that typify a large set of western musical styles—from European court, church, and concert compositions of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, to North American and British popular chart toppers of the twentieth and twenty-first—may be generalized by a model based in neoclassical economics. This talk summarizes some of these findings, with a focus on how these economic generalizations may be incorporated into a music theory curriculum.

Biography:  

Scott Murphy has taught music theory at the University of Kansas since 2001. He holds a PhD in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music. He has published articles on a variety of topics, including new approaches to works by J.S. Bach, Haydn, C. Schumann, Ives, Bartók, Myaskovsky, and Penderecki, on film music analysis and new conceptions of musical time, especially with regards to the music of Brahms. He edited Brahms and the Shaping of Time, a collection of essays analyzing rhythmic and metric aspects of selected works of Brahms, published by University of Rochester Press in 2018, which received the Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award from SMT. He was the founding editor of SMT-V: Videocast Journal of the Society for Music Theory and is a past president of Music Theory Midwest.