Faculty Profiles

Vasili Byros

Assistant Professor, Music Theory and Cognition

v-byros@northwestern.edu
847-467-2032

BACKGROUND

PhD, Yale University

Vasili Byros researches the cultural and psychological foundations of style in music of the long eighteenth century. He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled The Act of Hearing: Cultural Psychologies of Style in Music of the Late Eighteenth Century, whose ambition is to gain access to historical modes of listening via several case studies; these cases seek to reconstruct a contemporary listener through analysis of musical corpora and other ethnographic documents, alongside an interdisciplinary theoretical model that builds on previous work in music theory and music history, situated cognition, historical linguistics/pragmatics, cultural theory, and reader-response studies. He has been published or has work forthcoming in Music Analysis, Musica Humana, Theory and Practice, and in two multi-authored books contracted by Oxford University Press (on Topics, edited Danuta Mirka), and by Leuven University Press (on Cadences, edited by Pieter Bergé). Professor Byros has presented papers at numerous national, international, and regional conferences in North America and Europe, and has been invited to present research at various venues in the United States and Europe. At Northwestern he teaches courses on Schema Theory, Situated Cognition, Classical Form, Sonata Theory, Beethoven, Style Composition, and Schenkerian Analysis. He previously taught at Yale University (2005-09) and Indiana University, Bloomington (2009-10). Visit his personal web site.