Fanny Peabody Professor of Music; Chair
Theory
arehding[at]fas.harvard.edu
Music Building 305N (Professorial)
Music Building 104 S (Chair's office: 617-495-9854 )
Department Reception: 617-495-2791

Rehding spent many years at the other Cambridge (BA, MA, MPhil, PhD) and held research fellowships at Emmanuel College Cambridge, the Penn Humanities Forum and the Princeton Society of Fellows before joining the Harvard Department in 2003, initially as Assistant Professor. Rehding recently finished his editorship of Acta musicologica. He is the recipient of a number of fellowships, including, most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship.

His research interests are located at the intersection between theory and history, and cover a wide spectrum from Ancient Greek music to the Eurovision Song Contest. He is interested in the history of music theory, paleo- and neo-Riemannian theory, music-aesthetic questions, and issues of sound and media.

In the field of theory, Rehding has worked extensively on Hugo Riemann, in such publications as Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought, and the Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories (with Edward Gollin). He has co-edited an exploration the concept of nature, employed as a foundational principle in key epochs of the history of music theory in Music Theory and Natural Order (with Suzannah Clark). Other recent works in the history of music theory include studies of Jean-Philippe Rameau and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Vincent d'Indy and a guest-edited volume of Contemporary Music Review that examines the connections between music theory and very recent music. In the field of music history, Rehding has published widely on Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner. He recently completed a book entitled Music and Monumentality that explores the idea of monumental music in the German nineteenth-century repertoire--the imaginary connection between "big" sounds and "great" music and the function of such music in the collective memory. Other areas include work on Stravinsky and a guest-edited volume on Schoenberg's Moses und Aron (with Elliott Gyger).

More recently, Rehding has been interested in how modern sound media--the phonograph, the gramophone, the radio, the siren, and very slow music in the digital age--have affected our listening habits and, more broadly, the meaning of music. The twin interests in technology and in musical thought have paved the way toward his current research project, entitled Notes on Sound: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Acoustics and Aesthetics, which examines the relationship between nineteenth-century thinking about sound (in the sciences) and about music (in philosophy and the arts).