Project at HIAS
Music Theory and its Global Physiognomies & Johann Mattheson and the Phenomenology of Music
During his Fellowship, Thomas Christensen works on two intersecting projects linked by the discipline of historical music theory. His first and major project will be the completion of a synthetic monograph reflecting on the historical epistemologies of music theory on a global scale. His hope is to understand to what extent music theory and analysis as practiced in the Western academe is a useful and legible historical heuristic in non-western cultures, particularly those with non-literate traditions. Can we identify commonalities that cross–and perhaps connect—diverse historical and cultural boundaries of music? A second more empirically focused project is to spend time in the archives of the Hamburg Staatsbibliothek researching the writings of the 18th-century Hamburg polymath, Johann Mattheson, one of the most prolific and astute music critics of the German Aufklärung.
His Tandem Partner is Jan Philipp Sprick, researcher in music theory and president of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.
Tandem
Prof. Dr. Jan Philipp Sprick, Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg
Biography
Christensen is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught for the past 27 years. He received his PhD in music theory from Yale University in 1985. Christensen’s research has received support and recognition over the years from a variety of academic associations and funding agencies, including fellowships from the DAAD, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the ACLS, and the Guggenheim Foundation. An active citizen in the international community of music scholars, Christensen has served as President of the Society for Music Theory and as a member of the Executive Board of the American Musicological Society.
Christensen’s scholarly research career has largely focused on the history of music theory. Fundamental to his work has been a desire to situate the many intellectual frames, arguments and linguistic models used by writers in the early modern period deeply within their cultural milieu. He has authored over 80 publications, including monographs on the music theory of the 18th-century philosophe, Jean-Philippe Rameau, the Hamburg based musical savant, Johann Mattheson, and the 19th century Belgian music theorist, François-Joseph Fétis, as well as edited the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (2003). Other areas of research interest include improvisation and musical embodiment, piano transcriptions in 19th-century bourgeois music culture, and the idea of musical tonality.
Thomas Christensen’s HIAS Fellowship is funded by the Hapag-Lloyd Stiftung.