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Faculty & Staff > History & Theory >Ben Steege |
Ben Steege
20th Century History & Theory
benjamin.steege@stonybrook.edu
Benjamin Steege is a music theorist and historian who studies the modern cultural histories of music, music theory, pedagogy, and related sciences and technology. His interests include the history of listening; material culture of music in the 19th to 21st centuries; music and cultures of experiment; relations between musical and scientific modernisms; historical notions of temporality; historiography. He is currently working on a project exploring the position of 19th-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz in relation to emergent discourses of sensation, aurality, attention, and humanism. He has published on the work of Edgard Varèse and is now writing about how a range of musical modernisms engaged new forms of technological modernity emerging around 1900 (with emphasis on music of Claude Debussy, Leoš Janáček, and Arnold Schoenberg). Prof. Steege has previously taught at Williams College.Education
Harvard University, Ph.D., 2007
Columbia University, B.A., summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with Department Honors in Music, 2000
Academic Employment
Assistant Professor of Music, Stony Brook University, 2007-present
Graduate teaching:
Debussy and Modernism (Spring 2009)
Analysis of Music of the 20th and 21st Centuries (Fall 2008)
The Pierrot Tradition: Voice and Persona in 20th-Century Music (Spring 2008)
Music, Science, and Modernity, 1750-1925 (Fall 2007)
Undergraduate teaching:
Music from 1830 to the Present (survey for music majors)
Sound Structures (introduction to intensive study of music for majors)
Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, Williams College, 2006-2007; Music Theory and Musicianship I and II
Teaching Fellow in Music, Harvard University, 2003-2005; courses in harmony, counterpoint, and analysis
Papers
“Musical Modernism and the Culture of Experiment” (read at “100 Years of Futurism: Sounds, Science, and Literature: An Interdisciplinary Colloquium,” University of North Carolina at Greensboro, February 20-21, 2009)
Pre-concert lecture, Contemporary Chamber Players concert (Stony Brook University, October 15, 2008)
“Helmholtz and Voice Culture” (read at the Fifteenth Biennial International Conference on
Nineteenth-Century Music, University College Dublin, June 25-28, 2008)
“Debussy and the Movement-Image” (read at the Third Annual Conference on Music and
the Moving Image, New York University, June 30-May 1, 2008)
Pre-concert lecture, “The Piano Project” (Stony Brook University, March 11, 2008)
“Helmholtz and Voice Culture: Just Intonation in Perspective” (read at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Baltimore, November 15, 2007)
“Material Ears: Pathologies of Modern Attention in Helmholtz’s Physiological Aurality” (American Musicological Society, Seattle, 2004)
“Modern Attention and Modernist Aurality in Helmholtz and Varèse” (Columbia U. Graduate Student Conference in Music Scholarship, 2004)
Publications
Commentary to a new annotated translation of Hugo Riemann, “The Nature of Harmony,” in Alexander Rehding and Edward Gollin, eds., The Riemann Handbook, forthcoming from Oxford University Press
Essay-review of Myles Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), and Matthias Rieger, Helmholtz Musicus. Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz’ Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2006), forthcoming in Journal of Music Theory 50/2 (2008)
“Varèse in vitro: On Attention, Aurality, and the Laboratory,” Current Musicology 76 (Fall 2003; appeared in winter 2005)
Grants and Fellowships
FAHSS Individual Grant, Stony Brook University, 2008
Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship, American Musicological Society, 2005-2006
Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst Research Grant, 2004-2005
Krupp Foundation Fellowship, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 2004-2005
Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship, Harvard University, 2004-2005 (declined)
Service
Honors College Committee, Stony Brook Brook University (Fall 2008-present)
Co-chair, Colloquium Committee, Music Department (Fall 2007-present)
Undergraduate Studies Committee, Music Department (Fall 2007-present)