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Scott Burnham

Department/Program(s):
    Title: Professor of Music.
    Office: 218 Woolworth Music Center
    Phone: 609-258-4254
    Scott Burnham



    Scott Burnham

    Professor of Music

    Scott Burnham holds a B.M. from Baldwin-Wallace College, a M.M. in Music Composition from Yale University School of Music, and a Ph.D. in Music Theory and Analysis from Brandeis University. His scholarly interests include the history of tonal theory, problems of analysis and criticism, and 18-and 19th-century music and culture; publications reflecting these concerns have appeared in such journals as Beethoven Forum, Current Musicology, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Music Theory, Musical Quarterly, Music Theory Spectrum, and 19th-Century Music. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center.

    Burnham has taught graduate seminars on the music of Schubert and Beethoven, analytical issues in tonal music, and the history of tonal theory from Rameau to Schenker; he also teaches undergraduate theory and analysis. He shares his home with his wife Dawna Lemaire, a registered music therapist, and their three children.

    Representative Publications

    Beethoven Hero, Princeton University Press, 1995. A study of the values and reception of Beethoven's heroic-style music. Won the 1996 Wallace Berry Award from the Society of Music Theory.

    • Translator and editor of A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and Method, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

    • "How Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited," Rethinking Music, Oxford University Press, ed. by Nicholas Cook, 1998.

    • "Mozart's felix culpa: Cosi Fan Tutte and the Irony of Beauty," Musical Quarterly 78, 1 (1994).

    • "Musical and Intellectual Values: Interpreting the History of Tonal Theory" Current Musicology no. 53 (1993).

    • "The Criticism of Analysis and the Analysis of Criticism," 19th-Century Music, (Summer 1992).

    • "Method and Motivation in Hugo Riemann's History of Harmonic Theory," Music Theory Spectrum, (Spring 1992).