Scott Burnham

Chair,
Professor of Music

Scott Burnham holds a B.M. from Baldwin-Wallace College, a M.M. in Music Composition from Yale University School of Music, and a Ph.D. in Music Theory and Analysis from Brandeis University. His scholarly interests include the history of tonal theory, problems of analysis and criticism, and 18-and 19th-century music and culture; publications reflecting these concerns have appeared in such journals as Beethoven Forum, Current Musicology, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Music Theory, Musical Quarterly, Music Theory Spectrum, and 19th-Century Music. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center.

Burnham has taught graduate seminars on the music of Schubert and Beethoven, analytical issues in tonal music, and the history of tonal theory from Rameau to Schenker; he also teaches undergraduate theory and analysis. He shares his home with his wife Dawna Lemaire, a registered music therapist, and their three children.

Representative Publications:

• Beethoven Hero, Princeton University Press, 1995. A study of the values and reception of Beethoven's heroic-style music. Won the 1996 Wallace Berry Award from the Society of Music Theory.

• Translator and editor of A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and Method, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

• "How Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited," Rethinking Music, Oxford University Press, ed. by Nicholas Cook, 1998.

• "Mozart's felix culpa: Cosi Fan Tutte and the Irony of Beauty," Musical Quarterly 78, 1 (1994).

• "Musical and Intellectual Values: Interpreting the History of Tonal Theory" Current Musicology no. 53 (1993).

• "The Criticism of Analysis and the Analysis of Criticism," 19th-Century Music, (Summer 1992).

• "Method and Motivation in Hugo Riemann's History of Harmonic Theory," Music Theory Spectrum, (Spring 1992).

Paul Lansky

William Shubael Conant
Professor of Music

I grew up in New York City, and went to the High School of Music and Art, and Queens College in the City University of New York; graduate study was at Princeton University, 1966-69; Ph.D., 1973. I joined the faculty in 1969. My early musical interest was in performance (French Horn, Dorian Quintet, 1965-66).

Computer music has been my main preoccupation since about 1973. For the most part my work has involved non-real time processing of 'real world' sounds. In this respect I like to regard the computer as an aural camera, and I often use visual metaphors to describe my work. A large number of my pieces involve speech of one sort or another, often informal.

I have also spent considerable time writing software for computer music, some of which is now widely used. Most of my compositions to date are available on CD, a complete list can be found on my homepage (music.princeton.edu/~paul); software in the 'Princeton Sound Kitchen', (music.princeton.edu/PSK). I periodically dabble in what I like to call 'protein music' (as opposed to 'silicon music') and continually marvel at the genius of live performers --working on the computer has made me much more appreciative. Recent works are for guitar, chorus, violin and marimba.

At Princeton I teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in all aspects of computer music. I also teach composition, and topics in 20th century theory and analysis.

Steven Mackey

Professor of Music

The significant influences on my work as a composer are my experience as a rock/blues guitar player in early 70's bands, as a renaissance and baroque lutenist in late 70's early music ensembles, and as a student of Western art music from the 12th through 20th centuries at the University of California at Davis, The State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Brandeis University.

My music emphasizes real-time human performance. It frequently includes electric guitar that I play myself but I continue to be fascinated by the possibilities and idiosyncrasies of traditional acoustic instruments and the people who play them.

During the school year I have various points of contact with students. In addition to leading the classes and seminars listed in the course catalogue, I meet with students individually to discuss composition, theory, literature, and virtually anything of common interest. As Co-director of the Composers' Ensemble at Princeton (a performance organization which performs mostly student, some faculty and occasionally other composers' compositions) I work closely with students on the preparation of performances of their work. I sometimes conduct but more often coach and give moralsupport to players and composers. I also enjoy improvising with students who aresimilarly inclined. Usually, the result of these jam sessions is simply quivering air but on occasion they have led to live performances and useful tapes.

Recent Compositions include:Ravenshead a 90 minute mono-drama for singer/actor and electro-acoustic chamberensembleDeal for Electric Guitar, Drum Set and Chamber Orchestra written for Bill FrisellEating Greens written for the Chicago Symphony OrchestraBanana Dump Truck, Concerto for Cello and orchestra written for Fred Sherry

Recent CD on Bridge Records:Lost and Found Electric Guitar Music by Steve Mackey

Barbara White

Associate Professor of Music

My recent works range from an exploration of "misplaying" the clarinet (No-Man's Land) to a collaborative dance/opera (Life in the Castle) to a portrait of a community's musical history (Raging River, Rolling Stone). Composing for dance and community-based residency projects has kindled my interest in reworking "found music," a habit which has begun to bleed into my concert music as well. Recently I completed a series of pieces, Apocryphal Stories, in which I assemble and deform a motley collection of preexisting materials, creating new artifacts out of excavation, appropriation, and commentary. Apocryphal Stories places reverent homages alongside mischievous misreadings, but the pieces share a common preoccupation with memory and identity-with the ways my formative experiences continue to haunt me and to inform my compositional practice.

My scholarly work combines analyses of the "nuts and bolts" of musical design with investigations of cultural context, approaching such topics as jazz analysis, interculturalism, signification in contemporary opera, and the workings of gender in composition and analysis. My graduate and undergraduate courses, similarly, tend to investigate interdisciplinarity and/or cultural context. Recent topics include the perplexing relationship between high and low cultures in our current musical landscape; strategies of autobiography and masquerade in composition; and the interdependence of sound and image in dance and film.

Dan Trueman

Assistant Professor of Music

As a performing composer, I play various kinds of violins, including the 6-string electric violin, the Hardanger fiddle, and instruments of my own design and construction. Much of my music arises from my relationships with these instruments, either directly (through improvisation) or metaphorically (where the design of the instrument becomes a metaphor for some kind of musical construction). Recognizing that musical instruments embody both compositional and cultural ideas, I build my own instruments, both "hardware" and "software," and regard this as part of my compositional process. I perform these instruments in various ensembles, including Trollstilt (a duo for Hardanger/electric fiddles and guitar, with Monica Mugan) and "interface" (an electronic improvisation ensemble, with Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn). These projects inevitably lead me into interdisciplinary explorations with dancers, visual artists, and computer scientists. I studied Physics at Carleton College (B.A. 1990), Composition and Theory at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati (M.M. 1995), and Composition at Princeton (Ph.D. 1999). At Princeton I teach composition, electronic/computer music and theory at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and seminars that explore: "crossover" music and musical appropriation; musical instruments, music and culture; interdisciplinary creative spaces, and others.

Recent CDs:
Machine Language, Bridge 9149
Recording Field, H, Deep Listening DL-DVD-27
Trollstilt, Azalea City/ACCD-2004
Jswank, c-74-002

Recent Publications:
• "BoSSA: the Deconstructed Violin Reconstructed." Dan Trueman and Perry Cook. Journal of New Music Research, vol. 29, #2, 2000.

Dmitri Tymoczko

Assistant Professor of Music

I grew up in Western Massachusetts, playing in rock bands and pretending to study classical piano. At Harvard, I studied composition with Milton Babbitt, Leon Kirchner, and Bernard Rands. After graduating, I received a Rhodes Scholarship to do graduate work in philosophy at Oxford University; but spent most of my time learning to play jazz piano. In 1997, I entered the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley, where my teachers included Jorge Liderman, Olly Wilson, John Thow, and Edmund Campion. I received my Ph.D. in 2002.

My interests, as both composer and theorist, involve a few basic, and somewhat idiosyncratic, convictions. First, I think that the tonal system, rather than dying a sudden death around 1911, has continued to evolve over the last 100 years, in both the "classical" and "popular" traditions. As a theorist, I am interested in exploring the evolution. (I am especially fascinated by the various connections between the worlds of jazz and classical music.) As a composer, I am trying to participate in it, writing music that I hope is both tonal and modern. A second conviction is that musicians tend to make too much out of differences between genres. I like to think of myself as participating in a culture that includes not just contemporary concert music, but also popular music, jazz, folk music, classical music, and pretty much everything else. In particular, I hope to make a concerted effort to try to think about what I am doing, not just from the vantage of contemporary academic art, but from a more general perspective that (hopefully) encompasses fundamental human values. A third (and perhaps more prosaic) conviction is that technology is fundamentally changing the nature of music, not just by providing us with new sounds, but also by providing us with new ways of thinking in and about music. I am very interested in computer-assisted composition, analysis, improvisation, and the interactions between these.

Perry Cook

Professor of Computer Science
(Jointly in Music)

I attended the University of Missouri, Kansas City Conservatory of Music (UMKC), studying voice and electronic music. After working in professional sound reinforcement and recording for a while, I received a BA in music and a BS in electrical engineering from UMKC. I then went to the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, receiving a Master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering, researching the computer simulation of vocal and instrumental acoustics, reverberation, and new controllers for real-time electronic music performance. I have served as Senior Research Scientist for the multi-media company Media Vision, as a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engineer for NeXT computers and others, and as Technical and Acting Director of Stanford CCRMA. I received a 2003 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to write a new book on the history of technology and the singing voice.

My research and teaching centers on audio for computer-mediated systems and environments, algorithms for real-time computer synthesis of sound from physical models, audio at the human-computer interface, and controllers for expressive real-time artistic performance, and synthesis/control of singing voice models. I also sing and record early music.