The University of Oklahoma's music theory students study in an environment that involves one-to-one mentorship by academic faculty scholars with a wide range of scholarly interests, including music theory pedagogy, history of music theory, Schenkerian analysis, 20th-century compositional techniques, semiotics, aesthetics, and more. The faculty scholars encourage students to engage in similarly diverse subjects.
The Norton Lecture Series celebrates the memory of composer, conductor, and pianist Spencer H. Norton. Norton served the University School of Music as a faculty member for 41 years. He was the director of the school from 1947 to 1950, and in 1960 was appointed George Lynn Cross Research Professor, the highest research honor that a faculty member may receive at OU.
Email: vivian.luong@ou.edu
Office: Catlett Music Center 127I
Vivian Luong is a music theorist who studies the ethics of music analysis, feminist and queer theory, Schenkerian analysis, and affective autoethnography. Her dissertation, “Analysis as Ethics: Experiments with Music Loving,” explores the caring practices and harmful effects of analysis through the perspectives of feminist music theory and new materialisms. Vivian is currently working on a book project that reconsiders key music-theoretical concepts, such as bodies, love, and musical agency, in dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and other minoritized perspectives.
Her research on these topics appears in Music Theory Online, Theory and Practice, the Engaged Music Theory Blog, and the podcast Her Music Academia. As well, her work will be published in several forthcoming collections including Queer Ear, The Oxford Handbook on Musical Variation and Thematic Techniques, Modeling Musical Analysis, and Trauma-informed Pedagogy in the Music Classroom. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Institute on Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at the University of Michigan.
Committed to forming coalitional academic spaces, Vivian served on the Society for Music Theory LGBTQ+ Task Force that examined how music theory can better support LGBTQ+ members and scholarship. The task force’s efforts culminated in the creation of the Standing Committee on LGBTQ+ Issues, of which she currently serves as chair. Vivian also participates in the Engaged Music Theory Working Group as a mentor and co-curator of its bibliography of resources on connecting music theory to broader cultural perspectives.
At the University of Oklahoma, Vivian regularly teaches courses in the undergraduate theory core and a graduate course on the pedagogy of music theory, as well as offering graduate seminars on topics including music and the body, music and disability, and theorizing global musics. Prior to joining the faculty at OU, Vivian worked at the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Virginia, and the University of Michigan, where she received her PhD in music theory.
Office: Catlett Music Center 006C
Email: jswinkin@ou.edu
Website: jswinkin.com
Jeffrey Swinkin holds a bachelor’s with high distinction in piano performance from The Eastman School, a master’s in piano from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in music theory also from Michigan. As a pianist, he has performed across North America, has freelanced in New York City, working with singers from Broadway, and has collaborated with members of the Ying Quartet. As a theorist, Dr. Swinkin has published on topics ranging from Adorno, Beethoven, and performance practice to form theory, chromaticism, performance and analysis, and musical emotion—in such journals as Music Analysis, The Journal of Musicology, and the International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music. He has published five books, as either author or editor, including the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Musical Variation. Dr. Swinkin has given talks at numerous universities, including Stanford, Stony Brook, Michigan State, McGill, and Mannes, where he was a finalist for the Edward Aldwell chair. He is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Oklahoma.
For more information, please visit jswinkin.com.
Office: Catlett Music Center 230
Email: matthew.schullman@ou.edu
Matthew Schullman (Ph.D., Yale 2016) is a twentieth-century specialist whose work focuses on Luciano Berio’s Sequenzas and issues of pattern recognition, categorization, and repetition in music. His recent work—based on his dissertation (Rethinking Patterns: Associative Formal Analysis and Luciano Berio’s Sequenzas) and delivered at conferences across the country—is devoted to musical qualities and the formalization of a perceptually salient pattern type that he dubs the “Mode of Activity.” Other topics of interest to Schullman include gesture, texture, and meter.
Teaching Interests: 20th-c. music, chromatic music, metric analysis
Research Interests: Pattern recognition, segmentation, categorization, quality, gesture, texture, meter
Office: Catlett Music Center 219
Email: Hallie.N.Voulgaris-1@ou.edu
