Taylor Greer
- Professor, Music Theory
-
Music Theory
223 Music Building I
- Email tag1@psu.edu
- Vitae Download/View CV
Biography
Taylor A. Greer, Professor of Music Theory and Analysis, was 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 and research interests include harmony, pedagogy, music semiotics, Schenkerian Analysis, French art song, 20th-century American Experimentalism, and the intersections between tonality and extra-musical association.
His recent research is encapsulated in a book entitled The Pastoral in Charles Griffes's Music: Aesthetic of Ambivalence (Indiana University Press, 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 and Java, as well as poets such as Oscar Wilde, William Sharp, and Walt Whitman. 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, he expanded the pastoral’s emotional spectrum—from the bright colors of serenity to the darker hues of grief, spiritual longing, and irony.
Greer’s 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. This study is interdisciplinary, integrating music analysis, aesthetics, semiotics, literature, and the visual arts.
Greer’s first book, A Question of Balance: Charles Seeger’s Philosophy of Music (University of California Press, 1998), was supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1991. Best known as the father of Pete Seeger, the legendary folk singer, Charles was as passionate about making music as he was about making sense of it. His writings are like music-intellectual tapestries in which the threads of experimental composition, folk music, musicology, and philosophical speculation are all interwoven. Greer reveals the theoretical foundation of Seeger’s compositional approach known as dissonant counterpoint that helped inspire Ruth Crawford and Henry Cowell, two of the leading American experimentalists during the early twentieth century. One reviewer wrote: “It is in the main a brilliant study of a brilliant man, which will do much to enhance the reputations of its subject and its author” (Music and Letters).
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, the Institute for Musical Research (University of London), and the International Conference on Music Semiotics in Honor of Raymond Monelle (University of Edinburgh).
Recently, Greer has developed an interest in popular music, as shown by a paper entitled “Remixing Marcie: Comparing Recordings in Joni Mitchell’s Early Style,” which he delivered in Paris at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (July 2025). He also was invited to contribute an essay to the Joni Mitchell Companion, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).
Throughout his teaching career Greer has been devoted to the pedagogy of aural skills, as shown by the textbook, Sight Singing Complete, 8th edition, which he co-authored in 2014. Finally, in 2007, he received the Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching from the College of Arts and Architecture.