Stephen Decatur Smith
Associate Professor, Music History and Theory
stephen.d.smith@stonybrook.edu
Stephen Decatur Smith’s research deals with twentieth-century musical modernism from
a broad interdisciplinary perspective, constellating the history of music with the
history of modern philosophy and the other arts. His musical interests focus on the
Second Viennese School, as well as popular music and politics. His theoretical interests
include psychoanalysis, phenomenology, vitalism, and the Frankfurt School.
Smith’s dissertation, “The Transfigured Flesh: Natural History in Adorno’s Musical
Thought,” studies the ways in which Adorno’s philosophy of music is conditioned by
his vision of an unending entwinement of human history and material nature. In music,
it claims, Adorno sees an expression of natural transience figured as a condition
of possibility and mortality at once.
Smith’s publications have appeared in Popular Music (an essay coauthored Martin Scherzinger)
and theJournal of Music Theory (in a special issue studying the musical thought of
Stanley Cavell, coedited by Smith and Brian Kane). Forthcoming publications will
appear in the Contemporary Music Review and the Journal of the Royal Music Association.
He has presented at conferences including the American Musicological Society, the
Society for Music Theory, and the American Comparative Literature Association.
Smith has also taught at NYU, where he received his PhD, and has received fellowships
from NYU, the Foreign Language Area Studies Program of the US Department of Education,
and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. Since 2010, he has chaired the Music
and Philosophy Study Group of the American Musicological Society, a dynamic new organization
devoted to providing a forum for the many varieties of musicological work that deal
with music and philosophy together.
At Stony Brook, Smith plans to teach courses on twentieth-century opera, the Second
Viennese School, Adorno, music and twentieth-century philosophies of experience, and
music and the shifting status of the human in twentieth-century culture.
-
See pagesensembles in residence
-
See pagesfaculty & staff
-
See pagesAffiliated Scholars
-
See pagesComposition
-
See pagesCritical Music Studies
-
See pagesEmeritus
-
See pagesEnsemble Directors
-
See pagesPerformance
-
See pagesStaff
-
-
See pagesgraduate profiles
-
See pagesComposition
-
See pagesHistory Theory Ethnomusicology
-
See pagesPerformance
-
-
See pagesensembles in residence
-
See pagesfaculty & staff
-
See pagesAffiliated Scholars
-
See pagesComposition
-
See pagesCritical Music Studies
-
See pagesEmeritus
-
See pagesEnsemble Directors
-
See pagesPerformance
-
See pagesStaff
-
-
See pagesgraduate profiles
-
See pagesComposition
-
See pagesHistory Theory Ethnomusicology
-
See pagesPerformance
-