Daniel Callahan

Daniel Callahan is a musicologist and dance scholar who researches how music moves people—whether dancers, musicians, orchestra conductors, or audience members—over the last few hundred years and today. He is currently finishing a book, The Dancer from the Music, that explores how US modern dance developed out of, depended on, and eventually distanced itself from canonical concert music. His research on John Cage and Merce Cunningham appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. He has a chapter on Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, Agnes de Mille, and Justin Peck forthcoming in the collection The Futures of Dance Studies. In May 2018 he had the honor of presenting the American Musicological Society’s Library of Congress Lecture, in which he shared his research on the relationship between Leonard Bernstein’s choreographic onstage conducting and very busy offstage life. Looking ahead, he is exploring a second book project on how conductors have moved their bodies on the podium and how their personal identities and networks allow their careers to move ahead or not. Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College, he was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2012.

 

Dissertation
The Dancer from the Music: Choreomusicalities in Twentieth-Century American Modern Dance
Columbia Degrees: 
PhD, Historical Musicology
2012