AMS History of Theory Study Group
Giulia Accornero & Siavash Sabetrohani
SMT History of Theory Interest Group
William O’Hara & Daniel Walden
hallie voulgaris
hallie voulgaris is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University and holds a BS in Mathematics and Music from MIT. hallie’s dissertation project focuses on visual (re)presentations of music theoretical information such as diagrams, tables, and notations in the treatises of 13th century musician and theorist Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawī. Theorizing these inscriptions as multi-sensory intersections of theory and practice, they interrogate the kinds of knowledge of the mind, body, and soul involved in the study of music theory. They explore their related interest in histories of musical notations more broadly as a co-organizer of facsimile singing groups at Yale. hallie is also interested in alternative popular music genres such as metal and hyperpop, transhistoricity, medievalisms, and queer listening.
Frederick Cruz Nowell
Frederick Cruz Nowell is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at Cornell University. His research explores connections between the history of music theory and modernist abstract painting, and he writes on topics in music aesthetics and contemporary art. His dissertation recovers the role of “cosmic rhythm” in the work of Hilla von Rebay, founding director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and shows how she drew on esoteric music doctrines to theorize abstract painting as a tool for training perception and developing spiritual intuition. He was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art and has contributed to projects at the Whitney, Guggenheim, Rockbund Art Museum, and the 14th Istanbul Biennial. He also serves on the Society for Music Theory’s Committee on Feminist Issues and Gender Equity (FIGE). He holds a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and an MFA in Art, Theory, and Practice from Northwestern University.
Giulia Accornero
January 2021 – December 2023
Giulia Accornero is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Harvard University, with a secondary field in Medieval Studies. She holds degrees in economics (BS, 2010) and musicology (BA, 2013; MA, 2016), and was a Graduate Fellow at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Spring 2020. Her dissertation centers on the medieval Mediterranean, and draws on media theory in examining attempts to reify and control the temporal aspects of musical sound. She also writes about music, sound, and media from the twentieth century through today. In recent years, she has given papers at the annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Renaissance Society of America, and American Musicological Society. She has also published articles on Segiu Celibidache’s musical phenomenology (2016) and new instrument making (2018) in Quaderni del Conservatorio «Giuseppe Verdi» di Milano, and an article about techniques and technologies of amplification in Italian contemporary composer Clara Iannotta in the journal SoundStageScreen (2021). She also has a chapter on the 1974 International Conference of New Music Notation in the forthcoming volume Material Cultures of Music Notation (Routledge, 2022). In 2013, she founded the Milan-based contemporary music series Sound of Wander, and in 2018 established the GEM Lab, a workshop in which Harvard GSAS students meet to sing on early musical notations.
Siavash Sabetrohani
October 2019 – December 2023
Siavash Sabetrohani is a PhD candidate in Music Theory and History at the University of Chicago. Before going to the US for his PhD studies, he studied music theory, modern and baroque violin in his home country Iran and in the Netherlands. He has been living in Berlin since 2019, conducting research on his dissertation project on the history of music theory in Berlin in the eighteenth century. His research interests include history of music theory, music before 1945, performance practice, partimenti and improvisation, and early recordings.
Leon Chisholm
October 2016 – October 2019
Leon Chisholm is a postdoctoral research scholar with the “Materiality of Musical Instruments” research group at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. His article “William McGibbon and the Vernacularization of Corelli’s Music” was published in Eighteenth-Century Music. Other research interests include the relationship between polyphonic instrument playing and the conceptualization of music in early modern Italy, microtonal keyboard instruments, intabulation, continuo playing, the early music movement, and organs made entirely of wooden pipes. He holds a Ph.D. in Music History and Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He has held fellowships at the Cini Foundation in Venice, Harvard University, and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies of Columbia University.
Stephanie Probst
October 2016 – October 2019
Since completing her Ph.D. at Harvard University in May 2018, Stephanie Probst has been holding research fellowships at the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the University of Cambridge, where she is part of the ERC-funded project on “Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century.” In these positions, she has been investigating manual and mechanical forms of music inscription around 1900, such as performative annotations on music rolls for player pianos. Her dissertation explores theories of melody in the early twentieth century, in particular the prominent metaphor of the melodic line, at the intersection of developments in music, psychology, philosophy, science, and the visual arts.