August Sheehy

Assistant Professor of Critical Music Studies
August.Sheehy@stonybrook.edu

I am an historian of music theory and a music analyst with interests in composed and improvised musics of the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. I am also an active bassist and electroacoustic musician. 

My research takes up music theory and analysis as social practices, showing how the knowledge music theorists produce both responds to, and transforms, historical forces and individual needs. Uncovering music theory’s often concealed sociopolitical agendas highlights its centrality in intellectual histories from which it has often been excluded and opens up new approaches to analysis. Articles I have written have been published in Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Musicology, Yale Journal of Music and Religion, Music Theory Online, Theoria, and the edited volume Debussy’s Resonance.

My first book, Sonus Sacer: Music Theory in the Age of Biopolitics (Oxford University Press, under contract), examines the nineteenth-century emergence of a new paradigm for music theory in the work of the German lawyer, judge, and music theorist Gottfried Weber. I show how Weber’s insistence that music theory be based on analysis was a response to problems of law, governance, and religion exposed by the collapse of monarchical sovereignty and Napoleonic legal reforms that reshaped modern Europe and its colonial extensions. Music theory in the age of biopolitics became, like the societies in which it has flourished, less a matter of inviolable laws than of norms and normalized bodies.

My second book, Sonata Politics (in-progress manuscript), takes up a related thread in the genealogy of modern music theory by showing how the field’s longstanding fascination with musical form (Formenlehre), inaugurated by A. B. Marx in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is inextricably bound up with the history and ideology of Jewish-German assimilation.

I teach courses ranging from music theory fundamentals to graduate-level seminars that center theorizing as a creative activity. In 2022, I received the 2022 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching for my work centering the music of jazz luminaries such as Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald in the music analysis graduate curriculum. Recent PhD seminars include Music Theory and the Body Politic, What is Jazz Theory?, The Music of Charles Mingus, and Music Theory and Biopolitics.

As an active bassist in and around New York City, I have performed with Ray Anderson, Martin Erlich, Margaret Schedel, Hans Tammen, Andy Pitcher, Darrell Smith, Jeremy Carlstedt and others. I also perform and record as a solo electroacoustic artist under the moniker as.dB and in various serendipitous duo projects.

I completed my PhD at the University of Chicago (2017) with the support of a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship, recognizing outstanding work in religious studies and ethics. My work has also received support from the DAAD, Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, and the Max Kade Foundation.

Education:

• PhD in Music History and Theory, University of Chicago
• MA in Music Theory, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• BM in Composition, Berklee College of Music