Cristina Gonzalez Rojo

Cristina González Rojo is a pianist and graduate student in music theory. Her current research focuses on hermeneutic analysis, with a special focus on topic theory applied to nineteenth-century repertoires. She is also interested in the analysis of performance practices and the expression of musical meaning in instrumental music, taking in a number of aspects including exchanges between the score, the performer’s embodiment, and their expressive decisions.

Cristina is currently preparing her doctoral dissertation with the provisional title “The Topical World of Johannes Brahms,” which will present an analytical methodology for Brahms’s chamber music based on topic theory as a way to situate the work’s significations historically and stylistically.

She will present her most recent paper this May at the II International Symposium on Musical Topics and Topic Theory at the University of Northern Colorado, titled “A Sonata Form That Calls for Topic Theory: Analysis of Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25/i. Allegro.” 

Her previous research has been presented at the XV International Congress on Musical Signification, the 21st Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society, and the SATMUS International Congress (Spanish Society for Analysis and Music Theory), with papers such as “Brahms 1854-2022: A performer’s search for meaning. Semantic Analysis of the Ballades Op. 10,” “The Retrospect in J. Brahms,” or “A Musical Stream of Consciousness in Granados Goyescas.”