About

Thomas Christensen is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He earned his PhD from Yale University in 1985 and specializes in the history of music theory. His scholarly research aims to situate the various intellectual frames, arguments, and linguistic models used by writers in the early modern period within broader cultural discourses. Christensen’s work includes a notable monograph on Jean-Philippe Rameau, analyzing his music theory as a response to Enlightenment science, and he has contributed to understanding the writings of 17th-century savants, thorough-bass theory in the 18th century, and the social aesthetics of piano transcriptions in the 19th century. He has also edited the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory and authored a recent book on the concept of tonality as elaborated by Joseph Fétis, supported by fellowships from prestigious institutions such as the ACLS and the Guggenheim Foundation. Christensen has served as President of the Society for Music Theory and has been actively involved in fostering international scholarly collaborations, particularly with German and French music scholars.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Mechanical engineering
• Management
• Medical education
• Engineering management

Selected publications

• History in the Shadows of Theory: Riemann and Fétis as Historians of Music Theory

  Georg Olms Verlag eBooks · 2024-01-01

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• Schubert’s Four-Hand Piano Music

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-08-31

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• <i>Hearing Homophony: Tonal Expectation at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century.</i> By Megan Kaes Long

  Music and Letters · 2021-01-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  There is a familiar and resilient story of musicological lore that tonality was first discovered by musicians near the beginning of the seventeenth century, with Monteverdi often singled out as the greatest hero in this epic drama. It is as if tonality was a natural language already out there awaiting to be uncovered. But due to centuries of modal sedimentation, it took musicians time to realize and put into practice the riches which this musical language offered them. (I have explored the roots of this musicological mythology in my own recent book, Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis (Chicago, 2019), pp. 67–114). In her marvellous new study, Megan Kaes Long argues that we need fundamentally to rethink this picture. It is not so much that there was nothing new to be heard in musical practice around 1600. Indeed, there was, as the subtitle of her book clearly...

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• Frontmatter

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
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• Frontmatter

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
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• The University Of Maine’s Advanced Manufacturing Center:

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering management
  • Engineering

  The University of Maine's College of Engineering has created an Advanced Manufacturing Center with a student-oriented mission. This center provides a distinctive engineering approach to solving manufacturing problems and gives Engineering Technology students hands-on experience working on engineering and manufacturing projects. With much of the center's work coming from off-campus businesses; the students gain practical experience with client communication, teamwork, business and project management and presentations in addition

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• Rameaus langer Schatten: Studien zur deutschen Musiktheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts. By Ludwig Holtmeier

  Music Theory Spectrum · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

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  According to Ludwig Holtmeier, we have gotten the history of eighteenth-century harmonic theory all wrong. Historians of music theory have consistently cast Rameau in the leading role in the story of eighteenth-century music theory. But our one-sided focus upon the Frenchman’s theory of the basse fondamentale or the acoustical generation of harmony through the corps sonore has led to a highly skewed history that has obscured the accomplishments of many other theorists of harmony, in particular some German writers who resisted boarding the Rameau bandwagon. Worse still, perhaps, Rameau’s own work has been distorted by the singular attention that has been accorded to his systematic or “scientific” theorizing contained in a few of his most prominent publications. If we look more carefully into a number of several less familiar practical writings by Rameau, however (some of them never even published in his lifetime or under his own name), a differing and far more complex figure comes into view. With the long-awaited publication of his 2010 dissertation, Ludwig Holtmeier elaborates these arguments in great—one might even say tendentious—detail. But we can well understand why he does so, as the stakes are high. Rameaus langer Schatten: Studien zur deutschen Musiktheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Rameau’s Long Shadow: Studies on German Music Theory of the Eighteenth Century) has the potential of rewriting two centuries of historical scholarship on eighteenth-century music theory.

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• ChemE Car That Cud: AIChE ChemE Car Engineering Design Proposal, The

  Figshare · 2019-01-01

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  The ChemE Car That Cud showcases Wyoming’s dominant industries of agriculture and mining by utilizing rumen fluid from a cannulated beef cow to generate hydrogen to be used in a hydrogen fuel cell and radioactive cesium, a byproduct of uranium that is often obtained from Wyoming’s mines, to time the car’s stop. The concentration of cesium-137 source is measured using the radioactive decay of cesium shielded by aluminum. The painted aluminum chassis was obtained from a previous team at UW, and modified using plastic k’nex toys to adapt to the current power source and stopping mechanism.

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• Chant

  2019-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 1 begins with a historical account of Fétis's theory of tonality, tracing its roots in earlier theoretical and philosophical traditions (in particular the writings of Alexandre Choron). While there is an "empirical" scale-based element to his notion of tonality, his theory ultimately is seen to represent a metaphysical conception of tonal relations that owes much to German Idealist philosophers such as Kant and Hegel; German Idealism also offered Fétis the grounding he needed to construct an ambitious universal history of tonality that encompassed all ages and cultures. In particular, the chapter focuses on the famous four "orders" of tonality by which Fétis reconstructed the evolutionary stages of Western musical tonality and dared thereby to predict its future.

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• Music Theory and Pedagogy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-01-16

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Frequent coauthors

• Atul Kohli

  45 shared

• Kent E. Calder

  41 shared

• Amitav Acharya

  39 shared

• Stephan Haggard

  University of California, San Diego

  38 shared

• Peter J. Katzenstein

  Cornell University

  38 shared

• Qin Yaqing

  Shandong University

  35 shared

• Lynn White

  29 shared

• Aaron L. Friedberg

  University of Oxford

  26 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2011-12)
• Fellowship from the ACLS (2015)
• Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2019)
• Guggenheim Fellow at the Statliches Institut für Musikforsch…