Taylor Greer

Taylor A. Greer is an associate professor in music theory and analysis. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, he earned a BA in music and philosophy as well as a Ph.D. in music theory, all from Yale University. His teaching interests include harmony, counterpoint, turn-of-the-century French art song, early modernism, music semiotics, exoticism, American folk music, and Schenkerian theory.

His recent research is encapsulated in a book entitled The Pastoral in Charles Griffes's Music: Aesthetic of Ambivalence to be published by Indiana University Press in May 2024. Charles Griffes was a visionary American composer at the turn of the twentieth century whose music synthesized many sources of inspiration including French sensuality, British Aestheticism, non- Western folk music drawn from China, Java, and the Arab peninsula as well as a wide range of poets including Oscar Wilde, William Sharp, and Walt Whitman. His book argues that Griffes revived and reinvented the eighteenth-century pastoral tradition, and that a new interpretive framework, called the ambivalent pastoral, is needed to calibrate his stylistic eclecticism.

Griffes’s pastorals also reflect the tensions in his personal life: his perpetual motion between urban parade and rural retreat as well as the challenges faced by a gay man living in a heterosexual world. Overall, Griffes expanded the pastoral’s emotional spectrum—from the bright colors of serenity to the darker hues of grief, spiritual longing, and irony. This study integrates Greer’s interests in analysis, music semiotics, aesthetics, and the rich historical cross currents in late-Victorian and fin-de-siècle French culture.

Greer’s first book was devoted to the thought of Charles L. Seeger, the twentieth-century American composer, theorist, and philosopher, for which he was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1991. In A Question of Balance: Charles Seeger’s Philosophy of Music (University of California Press, 1998), Greer argues that Seeger’s aesthetic philosophy served as the seed from which his writings in music compositional theory, criticism, and musicology all grew. Greer contributed an essay on the mutual influence between Seeger and his wife Ruth Crawford entitled “Philosophical Counterpoint: A Comparison of Seeger’s Composition Treatise and Crawford’s Folksong Appendix” for the collection Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds (University of Rochester Press, 2007). In addition, he has published essays and reviews in Journal of Music Theory, Theory and Practice, and In Theory Only, and has delivered papers at the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the Semiotic Society of America, and the Institute for Musical Studies, University of London.

Greer has also developed an interest in popular music traditions, as shown by a paper entitled “Joni Mitchell’s Ambivalent Laments,” which he delivered at a regional music theory conference at Yale University in April 2023. He is also interested in the pedagogy of aural skills and co- authored Sight Singing Complete, 8th edition (2014).

Finally, in 2007, he received the Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching from the College of Arts and Architecture.

Selected Publications

• Essay entitled "A Tale of Two Cadences: Charles Griffes's Prelude to Musical Irony" in The American Journal of Semiotics 39: 1-4 (Fall, 2023): 47-70.
• Essay entitled “Charles Griffes’s Xanadu: A Musical Garden of Opposites” in The Routledge Handbook of Signification, ed. Esti Sheinberg and William Dougherty, 154-63. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press, 2020.
• Essay entitled “The Unfolding Tale of Charles Griffes’s ‘White Peacock'” published in A Music Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte, (Part II), ed. David Carson Berry, Gamut, 3/1 (2010): 167-203.

• BA from Yale College
• MM from The University of Michigan
• PhD from Yale University

• Music Theory

BOOKS

• Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in Musicology ed. Bell Yung and Helen Rees, Taylor A. Greer (contributing author) This volume embraces the rich interdisciplinary fabric of Charles Seeger's thought, which blended together composition, theory, criticism, historiography, musicology, ethnomusicology, and philosophy. Greer's essay illuminates the influence that such thinkers as Goethe, Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russell had on the formation of Seeger's ideas. University of Illinois Press, 1999
• A Question of Balance: Charles Seeger's Philosophy of Music Taylor Aitken Greer A Question of Balance explores the vast writings of Charles Seeger, the twentieth-century American composer, teacher, theorist, and philosopher. Perhaps best known as the father of the folk singers Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger, Charles was as passionate about making music as he was about making sense of it. As a whole, his writings are like music-intellectual tapestries in which the threads of ultra-modernist composition, folk music, and philosophical speculation are all interwoven. One reviewer concluded that Greer's book is "‚Ķin the main a brilliant study of a brilliant man, which will do much to enhance the reputations of both its subject and its author." (Music and Letters) University of California Press, 1998
• Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-century Music ed. Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama, Taylor Greer (contributing author). Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger formed one of the most unusual partnerships in twentieth-century American music. Two of the fruits born from this partnership, his composition treatise and her commentary on an anthology of folk songs, shared the same philosophical approach. University of Rochester Press, 2007.
• Sight Singing Complete, 8th ed. Maureen Carr, Bruce Benward, Taylor Greer, Eric McKee, and Phillip Torbert

ESSAYS

• "A Tale of Two Cadences: Charles Griffes's Prelude to Musical Irony" in The American Journal of Semiotics 39: 1-4 (Fall, 2023): 47-70.
• "Charles Griffes’s Xanadu: A Musical Garden of Opposites" in The Routledge Handbook of Signification, ed. Esti Sheinberg and William Dougherty, 154-63. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press, 2020.
• "The Unfolding Tale of Charles Griffes's ‘White Peacock'" published in A Music Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte, (Part II), ed. David Carson Berry, Gamut, 3/1 (2010): 167-203.