Dr. John Peterson

Dr. John Peterson

540-568-5368

Associate Director of the School of Music
Associate Professor, Music Theory

Ph.D. (2014) Florida State University (Legacy Fellow); M.M. (2011), University of Colorado at Boulder; B.Mus. (2008), University of Western Ontario.

John Peterson studies form and musical meaning in classical music, musical theater, and popular music as well as music theory pedagogy. A proponent of collaborative research, John has published co-authored articles (with Brian Jarvis) in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and SMT-V, the Society for Music Theory’s video journal. His SMT-V article appears below. As part of a team of scholars, John worked to revise and expand Open Music Theory, an online, open-source, and freely accessible textbook, which, among other things, seeks to diversify the repertoire and topics traditionally covered in music theory classes. John is currently under contract with Oxford University Press to co-edit (with Kimberly Goddard Loeffert) Modeling Musical Analysis, a collection of 29 short essays written by minoritized scholars to model analytical writing for undergraduate students.

John has presented research at national and regional conferences, including: the Society for Music Theory, the Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory, Music Theory Southeast, the Texas Society for Music Theory, and the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic. He is currently technical editor for the online journal Analytical Approaches to World Music.

In addition to teaching in the music theory core curriculum, John offers undergraduate and graduate seminars in music theory on a variety of topics, including: musical form, music and social justice, public music theory, music and race, and underrepresented composers. One of his recent seminars invited students to collaborate with fiber arts students to create woven representations of musical analyses.