Benjamin Steege

Associate Professor of Music, Historical Musicology, Music Theory
Music Humanities Chair (Spring 2024)
Office Address: 
609 Dodge Hall

Benjamin Steege joined the Department of Music in 2012, having previously taught at Stony Brook University. He studies theoretical discourses around music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the history of science, the history of listening, and phenomenology. His research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Steege’s first book, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge University Press, 2012), thematized the collision between orthodox music-theoretical knowledge and the experimental modes of observation developed in new laboratory environments of the mid-nineteenth century. It won the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. His second book, An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2021), asks what it meant to adopt a critical stance toward the authority of naturalistic knowledge about music in the German interwar period. He recently discussed the latter book with Dr. Eamonn Bell on the New Books Network podcast.

He is currently working on three new projects: a translation of musical writings by the philosopher Günther Anders; The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, which he is co-editing with Jonathan De Souza and Jessica Wiskus; and a new book exploring the history of the very idea of "musical value."

Courses taught:

  • Music Humanities (W1123)
  • Music Theory I–II (V2318–V2319)
  • Techniques of 20th-Century Music (V3310)
  • Analysis of Tonal Music (G4360)
  • Topics in the History of Music Theory (G6300)
  • Proseminar in Music Theory (G6333)
  • Debussy and Modernism (G8371)
  • Music, Sound and Image Theory (GU4048, co-taught with Prof. Jane Gaines, Film/Media Studies)

 

 

Columbia Degrees: 
BA
2000
Degrees from Other Institutions: 
PhD
Harvard University
2007