The Department of Music at Princeton University

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 Haydn, Mozart, 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, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford University Press, 1998).



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



“Schubert and the Sound of Memory,” Musical Quarterly 84, 4 (Winter, 2000).

"The Four Ages of Beethoven: Critical Reception and the Canonic Composer,"

“Haydn and Humor,” The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. Caryl Clark

(Cambridge University Press, 2005).

"Novel Symphonies, Dramatic Overtures," The Cambridge Companion to

Schumann , ed. Beate Perrey (Cambridge University Press, 2007).