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Stephen Rodgers
(541) 346-5589
ser@uoregon.edu

Stephen Rodgers is an assistant professor of music theory and musicianship at the University of Oregon. Prior to coming to Oregon, he taught aural skills at his alma mater, Lawrence University, where he received his B.A. in English and music. He also taught tonal theory at Yale University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2005 with the help of a Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies.

His dissertation, “Circular Form as Metaphor in the Music of Hector Berlioz,” which he is currently revising for publication, explores the interaction of form and program in Berlioz’s instrumental music. A version of a chapter on the first movement of the Fantastic Symphony will be published soon as part of a collection of essays about disability in music, edited by Joe Straus and Neil Lerner. Portions of the project have also been presented at the international colloquium Berlioz in the Age of French Romanticism, Music Theory Midwest, and the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory.

Rodgers’s work on Berlioz grows out of a longstanding concern for the connections between music and other forms of expression. His scholarly publications and presentations have dealt with literary theorist Roland Barthes’s writings on the music of Schumann, film music and trauma, and comedy in Shostakovich’s opera The Nose and the Nikolai Gogol story upon which it is based. He has also written film reviews for The Scene, an arts and entertainment newspaper in Wisconsin, and many articles for Chamber Music magazine on such topics as classical music and Gen X, barbershop harmony, and young composers in New York City.

A composer as well as a theorist, he has received numerous commissions from the Yale Collegium Musicum, the Madison Children’s Choir, and the Waukesha Symphonic Band, among other ensembles. In March 2005 his original musical, The Last of the Great Romantics, was premiered at Yale University. He is also active as a tenor, having sung most recently with the Yale Schola Cantorum, a chamber choir directed by Simon Carrington.