Season 3 (Spring 2024)

Production Credits
Team Lead: Lydia Bangura
Production Lead: Katrina Roush
Peer Reviewer: Lynne Rogers
Engineered and Produced by: Matt Sandahl and Inés Thiebaut.

Music Credits
SMT-Pod Theme Music: Zhangcheng Lu
Closing Music: David Voss

Bio: Joseph Straus is a music theorist specializing in music since 1900. He has written technical music-theoretical articles, analytical studies of music by a variety of modernist composers, and, most recently, a series of articles and books that engage disability as a cultural practice. He has written textbooks that have become standard references. Many of his books and articles have received publication awards from the Society for Music Theory, of which he was President in 1997–99.

Keywords: Stravinsky, Petrushka, analysis, melody, harmony

Supplemental Materials (PDF)

Author's Website
Author's IG:@ethnowithabby
Muito Beleza Podcast

Production Credits
Team Lead: Shannon McAlister
Production Lead: David Thurmaier
Peer Reviewer: Rim Irscheid

Music Credits
SMT-Pod Theme Music: Zhangcheng Lu
Closing Music: David Voss

Bio: Abigail Lindo is a Jamaican-born researcher, educator, vocalist, and cultural theorist whose academic interests include Black sonic expression and identity, Jamaican popular music and gender dynamics, the politics of community music-making, and Portuguese popular music consumption and festival culture in the Azores - which is the topic of her forthcoming dissertation. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, supported by funding from the Society for Ethnomusicology, American Musicological Society, the Fulbright Commission of Portugal, and University of Florida. She is a former K-12 teacher, classically trained mezzo-soprano, and she enjoys composing in her downtime.

Keywords: Azores, Portugal, Viola da Terra, Gender, Feminism, Estado Novo

Author's Website
Author's Social (X/IG): @artsongsteve
Author's Facebook
Author's Podcast

Supplemental Materials (PDF)

Production Credits
Team Lead: Jennifer Weaver
Production Lead: Jose Garza
Peer Reviewer: Matt BaileyShea

Music Credits
SMT-Pod Theme Music: Zhangcheng Lu
Closing Music: David Voss
Other Acknowledgments: Learn about Maude Valerie White's music
Special thanks to Hyperion Records for permissions.

Bio: Stephen Rodgers is Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. He specializes in the study of song, especially songs by underrepresented composers. His book, The Songs of Clara Schumann, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press, and his edited collection, The Songs of Fanny Hensel, appeared with Oxford University Press in 2021. He also hosts a podcast about poetry and song, called Resounding Verse, as well a website devoted to songs by composers whose music has been marginalized, called Art Song Augmented.

Keywords: Music theory pedagogy, musical form, processual listening, George Saunders, Maude Valerie White

Author's Website (Assis)
Author's YouTube Channel (Assis)
Author's Website (Raimundo)

Supplemental Materials (PDF)

Production Credits
Team Lead: Anna Rose Nelson
Production Lead: Katrina Roush
Peer Reviewer: Ernesto Donoso

Music Credits
SMT-Pod Theme Music: Zhangcheng Lu
Closing Music: David Voss

Bio: Nariá Assis Ribeiro has bachelor and master degrees in music from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). She is currently a PhD student in musicology at Nova University of Lisbon (Portugal). In 2022 the Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal) granted her with a doctoral scholarship. She has published the articles “Allen Winold’s concept of unusual metric structure with obscured pulse” and “Phonograph effects, modernism and sound art: a reading (listening) of O Som é um texto desmutado – b-Aluria (Gabriela Nobre)”. Among her research interests are: 20th and 21st centuries’ music; non-beat-based rhythm; beat perception; electronic music.

Bio: Luís Raimundo holds two bachelor’s degrees, in Composition (from Lisbon Music College) and Musical Sciences (from NOVA University). Presently, he benefits from a scholarship by Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal), supporting his doctoral research. His project investigates textures and sound masses in 20th and 21st-century orchestral music. Additionally, Luís contributes as a program note writer for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's concerts in Lisbon. He has authored an article in the Portuguese Journal of Musicology, titled “For a Dramatic and Stylistic Reading of Serrana by Alfredo Keil”. He’s also the author of a few works for Concert Band.

Both authors are currently conducting their research with the support of a grant awarded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

Keywords: Twentieth-century music, beatless rhythms, texture, sound mass, electronic music.

Author's Website
Author's IG: @thomas.b.yee

Supplemental Materials (PDF)

Production Credits
Team Lead: Jennifer Weaver
Production Lead: Katrina Roush
Peer Reviewer: Craig Weston
Special Thanks: Special thanks to Craig Weston, Luis Javier Obregon, David Forrest, Liam Hynes-Tawa, and Jenny Beavers for literature recommendations, draft feedback, and insights helpful in producing this episode.

Music Credits
SMT-Pod Theme Music: Zhangcheng Lu
Closing Music: David Voss
Other Original Compositions: Luis Javier Obregon, Craig Weston, Thomas B. Yee

Bio: Some composers found their love of music hearing Brahms or Beethoven — Thomas (b. 1992) discovered his from the beeps and boops of the Super Nintendo. Thomas composes transformative Holocaust Remembrance opera (Eva and the Angel of Death) and concert pieces remixing live performance with the chiptune aesthetics of retro video game soundworlds. Thomas' research analyzes the representation of gender, race, and religion in video game music and the compositional innovations of Japanese 8-bit era video game composers. Thomas is Assistant Professor of Instruction in Theory & Composition at the University of Texas at San Antonio School of Music.

Keywords: Non-octave repeating scales, Jing Fang’s (京房) Three-scale Rise/Fall Tuning, Koizumi Fumio’s (小泉文夫) two-tetrachord theory of traditional Japanese modes, George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept, music of living composers.

Supplemental Materials (PDF)

Production Credits
Team Lead: Thomas B. Yee
Production Lead: Zach Lloyd
Peer Reviewer: Pete Smucker

Music Credits
SMT-Pod Theme Music: Zhangcheng Lu
Closing Music: David Voss

Bio: Brent Ferguson (stage name: Dr. B.A. Ferguson) is Lecturer in Games Sound and Music at Brunel University London. They primarily research interactions between music and multimedia. Recently, they released a co-written article on the weaponization of music in the video game Omega Quintet with the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, and they have published a resource outlining music theory concepts in video game music for the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy. Additionally, Brent is an active performer, composer of music for the concert hall and video games, and video game designer attempting to create interactive and educational experiences with the educational resource Choose Your Own Accompaniment for the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive, the music history role-playing game Bardcore, and music education game Conducktus.

Bio: Matthew Ferrandino is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Murray State University in Western KY. His research focuses on the analysis and interpretation of popular music and multimedia. In his spare time, Matthew is an active songwriter and chiptune enthusiast. He currently serves as the managing editor for Music Theory Spectrum.

Bio: George Reid is a lecturer in music technology and musicology at Kingston University, and the University of Northampton, in the United Kingdom. He is a ludomusicologist whose research centers on chiptune as a means of self expression, currently writing about the practice from a queer perspective and interrogating the ways in which timbre plays a role in the construction of subjectivity. He is also an avid composer of chiptune and pixel artist.

Keywords: Chiptune, arrangement, ludomusicology, hauntology, SNES