Benjamin Steege
Benjamin Steege is Associate Professor in the Department of Music, where he has taught since 2012. He previously taught at Stony Brook University (2007–2011), having received the PhD in Music at Harvard University in 2007. He studies theoretical discourses around music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with attention to intersections with the history of science, the history and phenomenology of listening, and film music. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 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), assesses the consequences of the collision between orthodox humanistic music-theoretical knowledge and the novel modes of experimental observation that developed within the laboratory environments of nineteenth-century Europe. It won the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2014.
His second book, An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2021), evaluates the historically significant critique of naturalistic aesthetics that emerged with the reception of Husserl, Heidegger and their interlocutors in interwar musical thought, as well as the more holistic vision of musical worldhood this critique began to elaborate. (He discusses the book with Dr. Eamonn Bell on the New Books Network podcast.)
Steege has also written on the music of Claude Debussy, Leoš Janáček, Edgard Varèse and Herbert Eimert, among other topics. He is on the editorial board of the journal History of Humanities; and with Jonathan De Souza and Jessica Wiskus, he is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music (Oxford University Press, 2023). He is currently working on three projects: a translation of the complete musical writings of German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders; a history of the idea of musical “value”; and a book on paranoia and film music since World War II.
Courses taught:
- Music Humanities (UN1123)
- Music Theory I, II & IV (UN2318, 2319 & 3322)
- Techniques of 20th-Century Music (UN3310)
- Music, Sound and Image Theory (GU4048, with Jane Gaines, Film)
- Analysis of Tonal Music (GR4360)
- Historiographies of Music Theory (Topics in the History of Music Theory, GR6300)
- Knowing, Doing, Making (Topics in the History of Music Theory, GR6300)
- Analysis, Description, Interpretation (Topics in the History of Music Theory, GR6300)
- Proseminar in Music Theory (GR6333)
- Debussy and Modernism (GR8371)
- Techniques of the Listener (Seminar in Music Theory, GR8319)
- Phenomenology of Music (Seminar in Music Theory, GR8319)
- Film Music (Seminar in Music Theory, GR8319)
