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The University of Colorado Boulder College of Music is thrilled to announce that Assistant Professor of Music Theory Leah Frederick will join the College of Music this fall.

“Although we’re sad that Steve Bruns is retiring, we’re very excited to have Leah Frederick join the music theory area,” says Professor of Music Theory Keith Waters, who chaired the search committee. “Leah has taught in some of the highest-ranking music programs including those at Indiana University, Oberlin College and Conservatory and—most recently—the University of Michigan.” 

At Oberlin, Frederick was involved in the redesign and launch of its new undergraduate music theory curriculum. While at Indiana University, she served as editor of the Indiana Theory Review and was awarded the Wennerstrom AI Fellowship for outstanding teaching.

Continues Waters, “Along with tremendous teaching expertise, she’s a practicing violist and a rising star in the music theory world. She will be a tremendous asset across the College of Music—including our Master of Music program in music theory where our graduates have gone on to join the faculties and teach at the Eastman School of Music, Cleveland Institute of Music, Harvard University, Wake Forest University and elsewhere.”

“I’m delighted to join the theory faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Music,” says Frederick, who specializes in mathematical approaches to music theory.

“One of the reasons that I was drawn to the field of music theory is the fact that it offers us so many different ways to think about and engage with music. I believe that music is an ideal medium through which students can embrace curiosity and learn to effectively communicate their own perspectives and ideas—skills that are essential to the College of Music’s mission to develop universal musicians.

“I look forward to growing with and learning from the CU Boulder College of Music community in pursuit of this goal.”

Frederick earned a PhD in music theory from Indiana University as well as a BS in mathematics and a BMA in viola performance from Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarship examines ways in which musical objects can be represented with mathematical structures—particularly the interpretive nature of this mapping. Her current project uses transformational theory to study relationships between patterns in instrumental spaces (i.e., the layout of notes on an instrument) and the corresponding pitch relationships they produce.

Frederick’s recently published work employs geometric and transformational techniques to examine the properties of diatonic versus chromatic musical space. Her writing on voice leading in mod-7 space appears in the Journal of Music Theory and Music Theory Spectrum; her dissertation on this topic was awarded the Society for Music Theory’s 2020 SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship and Indiana University’s 2018-20 Dean’s Dissertation Prize. A related conference paper received Music Theory Midwest’s 2018 Arthur J. Komar Award.

Frederick currently serves as co-chair of the Society for Music Theory’s Mathematics of Music Interest Group, on the Executive Board for the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music and on the Editorial Board for Music Theory Online. 

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