Steege, Benjamin
Benjamin Steege joined the Department of Music as Assistant Professor in Spring 2012, having previously taught at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the history of music theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to musical and scientific modernisms, the history of psychology, and the history of listening. He has been a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2010-11) and recipient of an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship (2005-06), and served on the editorial board of Music Theory Spectrum (2009-12). His book Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge) was published in 2012, and he is currently working on a second book project concerning the history of music psychology, aesthetics, and ethical values from 1890 to 1960.
Courses taught:
Diatonic Harmony and Counterpoint I-II (V2318-2319)
Analysis of Tonal Music (G4360)
Introduction to History of Theory (G6300)
Proseminar in Music Theory (G6333)
Debussy and Modernism (G8371--Spring 2013)
Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
"Janáček’s Chronoscope,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54/3 (Fall 2011), pp. 647–87
“‘The Nature of Harmony’: A Translation and Commentary,” in Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 55–91
“Helmholtz, Music Theory, and Liberal-Progressive History,” Journal of Music Theory 54/2 (Fall 2010), pp. 283–310
“Music Theory in the Public Sphere: The Case of Hermann von Helmholtz,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, special issue (2010), pp. 9–30
“Varèse in vitro: On Attention, Aurality, and the Laboratory,” Current Musicology 76 (Fall 2003), pp. 25–51
