November 7–10, 2024
2024 Annual Meeting | Jacksonville, Florida
Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music Networking Reception
9:00–11:00 PM | City Terrace 5

(Prospective students, click here.)

IU Music Theory SMT 2024 Event Schedule

View the Searchable Online Program
All times are EST

Thursday, November 7

2.15–3.25 pm | City Terrace 9 | Session: Hypermeter and Phrase Rhythm

Samantha Harris Waddell (PhD student), From Old-Time to “Hard Times”: Phrase Rhythm and Prosody in the Music of Tyler Childers

2.15–3.25 pm | City Terrace 12 | Session: Understanding Music Theory Through Labor, Law, and Technologies

Calvin Peck (PhD 2022), “AI, Copyright Law, and Musical Modernism’s Authorial Collapse”

3.30–5.30 pm | River Terrace 3 | Session: Just Two Cents on Tuning

Nathan Lam (PhD 2019), “Solfège Set Theory”

4.00–5.30 pm | City Terrace 9 | Session: Formal Frictions in Tonal Music

Diego Cubero (PhD 2014), “The Romanticization of the Rounded Binary in Robert Schumann’s Music”

Friday, November 8

8.00–9.30 am | St. Johns | Poster Session

Stanley Ralph Fink (MM 2011), “A Comparison of the Accuracy of Two Algorithms for Predicting the Behavior of ‘Soul Dominants’ in the McGill Billboard Corpus”

Joseph Grunkemeyer (PhD student), “Analyzing Patrick Stump’s ‘Soul Voice’: Vocal Timbre as a Signifier of Style and Genre”

Brent Yorgason (PhD 2009), “Exploring Form in Popular Music with Timeline Share”

9.00–10.30 am | River Terrace 3 | Session: Proximate Spaces: Reading Through Text, Intertext, and Recomposition

Jonathan Guez (MM 2008), “What Schubert Learned from Goethe”

2.15–3.45 pm | City Terrace 7 | Session: Don’t Bore Us – Take it to the … Prechorus?

Caleb Mutch (post-doctoral scholar 2017–2019), “Enter the Prechorus: Producing Intensification in Two Recent Taylor Swift Songs”

2.15–3.45 pm | City Terrace 9 | Session: Harmonic Perceptions: Analytical Styles in Chromatic Harmony

Wade Alan Voris (PhD student), “Sonic Experience: A Kurth Inspired Analysis”

4.00–5.30 pm | City Terrace 12 | Session: Punk, Reggaeton, Rap

Prof. Kyle Adams, Chair

Tori M Vilches (PhD student), “‘Sex Sells’: A Decolonial Analysis of Purplewashing and Sexual Narrative in the Women of Reggaeton”

4.00–6.00 pm | 3rd Floor Skybridge | Public Music Theory Poster Exhibit

Sara Bakker (PhD 2013) & Andrew Gades, “Does Music Theory Matter?”

Joseph Grunkemeyer (PhD student), “Analyzing Patrick Stump’s ‘Soul Voice’: Vocal Timbre as a Signifier of Style and Genre”

Brent Yorgason (PhD 2009), “Exploring Form in Popular Music with Timeline Share”

5.30–6.30 pm | Conference Center B | Prospective Graduate Student Fair

Saturday, November 9

9.00–10.30 am | City Terrace 9 | Session: Theoretical Crossings: New Applications

Simon Prosser (MM 2012), “Shostakovich, Lowered Modes, and SLIDE”

10.45 am – 12.15 pm | City Terrace 12 | Session: Haydn’s Middles

Prof. Roman Ivanovitch, Chair

10.45 am – 12.15 pm | River Terrace 3 | Session: Prosody and Text Setting in Popular Music

Alexander Michael Shannon (PhD student), “‘All the Lonely Starbucks Lovers”: Prosodic Dissonance in Taylor Swift’s Discography

Prof. Noriko Manabe, “The Development and Artistry of Text-Setting in Japanese Rock: Happy End and the Great Japanese Rock Debate (1970)”

9.00–11.00 pm | City Terrace 5 | IU Jacobs School of Music Networking Reception

Sunday, November 10

9.00–10.30 am | City Terrace 7 | Session: Analyzing Style & Blues

Clifton Boyd (MM 2012), Chair

9.00–10.30 am | River Terrace 3 | Session: Dance and/as Music Analysis

Prof. Amy Ming Wai Tai, Rethinking Musical Metaphors Through Dance

9.00–11.00 am | City Terrace 9 | Session: Tragedy, Liturgy, and Myth Across Cultures and Genres

Mitchell Ohriner (PhD 2011), “Listening to Acculturation in Chazzan David Kusevitsky’s Cantorial Recitative ‘L’eil Boruch’”

9.00–11.00 am | City Terrace 12 | Session: Applying Sets and Cycles

Justin Lavacek (PhD 2011), “Plotting Medieval Polyphony: An Enchiriadis Tonnetz”

10.45 am–12.15 pm | City Terrace 7 | Session: Popular, Internet, and Video Culture

Isaac William Smith, Ph.D. minor, The Mashups of Mouth Moods: Parody and Intertextuality in Neil Cicierega’s Third Album

11.15 am – 12.15 pm | City Terrace 9 | Session: Two Perspectives on Lili Boulanger

Matthew Bilik (MM 2015), “Flat Scale Degree Seven and Lost Love in Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel”

11.15 am – 12.15 pm | River Terrace 2 | Session: Musical Processes and Empirical Methodologies

Prof. Andrew Goldman, “The Contingency of Music Cognition”

The IU Department of Music Theory welcomes Nadine Hubbs to deliver two talks as part of the Five Friends Master Class Series in Music Theory. Hubbs is a musicologist, historian, theorist of music and society, and professor of women’s and gender studies and music at University of Michigan.

Hubbs has published on topics ranging from Bernstein to queer disco to Taylor Swift; two award-winning books, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound and Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music; and the award-winning collection Uncharted Country: New Voices and Perspectives in Country Music Studies. Her public-facing work features in outlets including the New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, BBC, and the Dolly Parton’s America podcast. Hubbs’s current book project is Border Country: Mexico, America, and Country Music.

Tuesday, October 15
5:00 pm, Ford-Crawford Hall
Music Theory Five Friends Guest Lecture
Nadine Hubbs (University of Michigan), “Country-Loving Mexican Americans: Borderlands Country Music Lovers’ Duel Patriotism and Inevitable Fandom”

Wednesday. October 16
4:00 pm, SM267 (Library)
Music Theory Colloquium Series Guest Lecture
Nadine Hubbs (University of Michigan), “Queer Influences in Country Music: The First Hundred Years”

Five Friends Master Class Series – Honoring Robert Samels

The Five Friends Master Class Series honoring the lives of five talented Jacobs School of Music students—Chris Carducci, Garth Eppley, Georgina Joshi, Zachary Novak, and Robert Samels—was established in 2012 with a gift of $1 million from the Georgina Joshi Foundation, Inc. This annual series of lectures, master classes, and residencies by a number of the world’s leading musicians and teachers focuses on areas of interest most relevant to the lives of the five friends—voice performance, choral conducting, early music, music theory, composition, and opera. The Georgina Joshi Foundation was established in 2007 as the vision of Georgina Joshi’s mother, Louise Addicott-Joshi, to provide educational and career development opportunities for young musicians and to encourage and support public performance of music. The gift to the school establishes a permanent way for the world to learn about each of the five friends, their musical talents and passions, and to encourage the development of similar talents and passions in current and future music students. The establishment of this endowment by the families is administered by the IU Foundation.

Bass-baritone and composer Robert Samels was born on June 2, 1981, and died in a plane crash on April 20, 2006. He was a doctoral student in choral conducting at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and had studied voice with Giorgio Tozzi and Costanza Cuccaro. He began his vocal studies with Alfred Anderson at the University of Akron and Andreas Poulimenos at Bowling Green State University. Samels had recently appeared as Mr. Gibbs in the world premiere of Our Town by Ned Rorem, as Marco in the collegiate premiere of William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge, and as Joseph and Herod in the collegiate premiere of El Nino by John Adams. In September 2005, he conducted the premiere of his own opera, Pilatvs. As a member of the Wolf Trap Opera Company for 2006, he would have added three roles that summer, including Bartolo in Le Nozze di Figaro, Friar Laurence in Roméo et Juliette, and Pluto in Telemann’s Orpheus. Other opera credits included the title roles of Don Pasquale and Il Turco in Italia, as well as Leporello in Don Giovanni, Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the summer of 2004, he performed Creon in the New York premiere of John Eaton’s Antigone. Samels also frequently performed in the oratorio repertoire. In the spring of 2005, he was selected as a semi-finalist in the annual competition of the Oratorio Society of New York. He was an announcer with public radio station WFIU, as well as the host and producer of its Cantabile program. A soloist with Aguavá New Music Studio, he had recently performed a concert at the Library of Congress. Samels was an associate instructor in the Jacobs School’s Music Theory Department, where was loved and admired by his students.

After eight years of exemplary service, Professor Kyle Adams has stepped down as chair of the Department of Music Theory. Earlier this year, Adams  Under his guidance, the department navigated numerous challenges, most notably the complex shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The department will not soon forget Adams’s commitment to student success and academic innovation.

Professor Noriko Manabe has been appointed as the new chair. Manabe joined the faculty of music theory in Fall 2024. She is also affiliated faculty for IU’s Folklore and Ethnomusicology Department, East Asian Languages and Cultures Department, East Asian Studies Center, Cultural Studies Program, and the Center for Research on Race & Ethnicity in Society. She previously served on the standing faculty in music theory at Temple University and in music at Princeton University. She holds a Ph.D. with a double concentration in ethnomusicology and music theory from CUNY Graduate Center. Before academia, she worked in the financial industry and was an Institutional Investor-ranked analyst in the internet and videogames industries.

In addition to the chair, Roman Ivanovitch has been appointed associate chair. Ivanovitch, who earned his doctorate from Yale University, is associate professor of music theory and has taught at the Jacobs School of Music since 2004.  His general research concerns issues of form, style, and aesthetics in the long eighteenth century, particularly with respect to Classical-era variation and sonata form. His principal focus is the music of Mozart, on which he has published articles in Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Music Theory, and Music Analysis. In 2012, he won the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award from the Mozart Society of America for his essay on Mozart’s retransitions.

To assist Manabe and Ivanovitch in streamlining communications related to their new appointments, the department has created a dedicated email, mtchair@iu.edu. Both chairs remain accessible through their individual email addresses for specific inquiries regarding research, teaching, and other non-chair service.

The department extends its deepest gratitude to Professor Adams for his years of leadership, dedication, and resilience, and the new leadership team looks forward to continuing the department’s tradition of excellence.

Next week, the IU Department of Music Theory welcomes musician and psychology and neuroscience researcher Psyche Loui to deliver two talks as part of the Five Friends Master Class Series in Music Theory. Dr. Loui is Associate Professor of Creativity and Creative Practice and Director of the Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics Laboratory (MIND Lab) at Northeastern University.

In addition to her lectures, Dr. Loui will hold office hours with graduate students. She will also present a workshop where she’ll discuss two papers, “New music system reveals spectral contribution to statistical learning” and “Generating New Musical Preferences From Multilevel Mapping of Predictions to Reward” with a group of graduate students from Music Theory, Cognitive Science, and a handful of undergraduate science students.

Wednesday, March 27
4:00 pm, SM267
Music Theory Colloquium Series Guest Lecture
Psyche Loui (Northeastern University), “Imaginings from an unfamiliar world: The Science of a New Musical System”

Abstract: The ability to create and to appreciate new music depends on prediction and imagination, a generative act that is deeply rooted in culture and familiarity, while also depending on the ability predict events in the near future. I will present recent work that combines music theory and music technology with cross-cultural behavioral testing, neuropsychological assessments, and neuroimaging studies in my lab on how and why humans across societies learn to love music, uncovering the role of different types of prediction on the dopaminergic reward system in the brain. These results are the first to highlight the process by which we learn from our predictions and our cultural backgrounds, and that learning itself becomes rewarding.”

Thursday. March 28
5:00 pm, Ford-Crawford Hall
Music Theory Five Friends Guest Lecture
Psyche Loui (Northeastern University), “Why Music Moves Us: New Directions in Music for Brain Health”

Abstract: Music is an integral part of every human society, and musical experiences have been associated with human health and well-being since antiquity. Recent use-inspired research on Music-Based Interventions (MBIs) include receptive (music listening) and active (music making) programs designed to make measurable changes to human health and well-being. Designing these interventions consistently and with measurable benefits require addressing the question of dosage, which refers to the duration and intensity (dosage) of the intervention. I argue that cognitive neuroscience can inform the question of dosage in MBIs by quantifying the effects of receptive and active music interventions on predictive coding in the central nervous system. As a ubiquitous feature of biological systems, predictive coding is posited to underlie perception, action, and reward. I will present recent work that encompasses behavioral testing, neuropsychological assessments, and neuroimaging (EEG and fMRI) studies in my lab on how and why humans across societies learn to love music, uncovering the role of different types of prediction on the activity and connectivity of the reward system. Given that music taps into a relatively domain-general reward system which in turn motivates a variety of cognitive behaviors, I will also consider how this knowledge can be translated into MBIs for those with neurological and/or psychiatric disorders, presenting preliminary results on Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease.”

Five Friends Master Class Series – Honoring Robert Samels

The Five Friends Master Class Series honoring the lives of five talented Jacobs School of Music students—Chris Carducci, Garth Eppley, Georgina Joshi, Zachary Novak, and Robert Samels—was established in 2012 with a gift of $1 million from the Georgina Joshi Foundation, Inc. This annual series of lectures, master classes, and residencies by a number of the world’s leading musicians and teachers focuses on areas of interest most relevant to the lives of the five friends—voice performance, choral conducting, early music, music theory, composition, and opera. The Georgina Joshi Foundation was established in 2007 as the vision of Georgina Joshi’s mother, Louise Addicott-Joshi, to provide educational and career development opportunities for young musicians and to encourage and support public performance of music. The gift to the school establishes a permanent way for the world to learn about each of the five friends, their musical talents and passions, and to encourage the development of similar talents and passions in current and future music students. The establishment of this endowment by the families is administered by the IU Foundation.

Bass-baritone and composer Robert Samels was born on June 2, 1981, and died in a plane crash on April 20, 2006. He was a doctoral student in choral conducting at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and had studied voice with Giorgio Tozzi and Costanza Cuccaro. He began his vocal studies with Alfred Anderson at the University of Akron and Andreas Poulimenos at Bowling Green State University. Samels had recently appeared as Mr. Gibbs in the world premiere of Our Town by Ned Rorem, as Marco in the collegiate premiere of William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge, and as Joseph and Herod in the collegiate premiere of El Nino by John Adams. In September 2005, he conducted the premiere of his own opera, Pilatvs. As a member of the Wolf Trap Opera Company for 2006, he would have added three roles that summer, including Bartolo in Le Nozze di Figaro, Friar Laurence in Roméo et Juliette, and Pluto in Telemann’s Orpheus. Other opera credits included the title roles of Don Pasquale and Il Turco in Italia, as well as Leporello in Don Giovanni, Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the summer of 2004, he performed Creon in the New York premiere of John Eaton’s Antigone. Samels also frequently performed in the oratorio repertoire. In the spring of 2005, he was selected as a semi-finalist in the annual competition of the Oratorio Society of New York. He was an announcer with public radio station WFIU, as well as the host and producer of its Cantabile program. A soloist with Aguavá New Music Studio, he had recently performed a concert at the Library of Congress. Samels was an associate instructor in the Jacobs School’s Music Theory Department, where was loved and admired by his students.