The Music Scholarship program at the University of British Columbia builds upon the talents of twelve faculty members with diverse research interests in both music and other disciplines. In addition to the traditional fields of music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology, the faculty have contributed to sound studies, Indigenous studies, cognition, disability studies, Asian studies, pedagogy, LGBTQ+ studies, and cultural studies. The program welcomes adventurous scholars who seek to explore across disciplines in both their course work and thesis projects. Students will consult with faculty members to tailor a program of study that allows them to work within different fields while developing their own areas of specialization.
Graduate funding is available from various sources including University fellowships, Teaching Assistantships, Research Assistantships, and grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
UBC Korean Drumming Ensemble
PhD Candidate Aram Bajakian
Hedy Law, Associate Professor, Musicology
UBC African Music and Dance, Kofi Gbolonyo Director
Professor, Ethnomusicology Michael Tenzer
UBC Balinese Gamelan
Music Technology at UBC
UBC Chinese Music Ensemble
Graduate studies at UBC
Music Technology at UBC
UBC Early Music Ensemble
Musicology at UBC
Recent graduates have obtained teaching positions at the University of Toronto, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McGill University, University of Victoria, University of California at Davis, Queens University, University of Michigan, Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Denpasar, University of Northern Iowa, University of Waterloo, University of Manitoba, Middle Tennessee State University, University of Kentucky, Portland State University, University of Tennessee, and Kwantlen University.
Meet our Faculty
Alex Fisher, Professor, Early Music & Musicology, Renaissance and Baroque Studies
is a musicologist specializing in music, soundscapes, and the sonic mediation of religious culture in early modern Europe, he is the author of Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580-1630 (2004), and Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria (2014). A performer on Renaissance trombone, he is co-founder of the ensemble Cappella Borealis and coordinates the University’s Early Music program.
Kofi Gbolonyo, Lecturer in African Music and African Studies
is an ethnomusicologist specializing in African music. His primary research and educational interests are in West African traditional music and dance, Orff-Schulwerk pedagogy, cross-cultural music education and Ghanaian brass band music. His scholarship focuses on indigenous knowledge and cultural values in the musical practices of the Ewe of West Africa. Gbolonyo enjoys teaching children and is the founder and director of the Nunya Music Academy and the annual Orff-Afrique Summer Programs in Ghana. Gbolonyo is an internationally recognized Orff-Schulwerk music educator and a seasoned clinician who conducts workshops and gives presentations all over the world.
Nathan Hesselink, Professor, Ethnomusicology
is Professor of global musicology. His research broadly encompasses the topic of rhythmic play and social meaning, firstly in South Korean traditional percussion genres and more recently in North American and British rock music. Recent publications include “Western Popular Music, Ethnomusicology, and Curricular Reform: A History and a Critique,” Popular Music and Society 44.5 (2021), and Finding the Beat: Entrainment, Rhythmic Play, and Social Meaning in Rock Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).
Robert Komaniecki, Lecturer, Music Theory
Dr. Komaniecki is a music theory and history lecturer. His scholarly interests are popular music, especially the analysis and cultural context of various popular genres throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is also interested in how technologies, from traditional instruments to the widespread use of DAWs, have shaped our collective tastes in music. Dr. Komaniecki has published and presented on hip-hop, musical theatre, music theory pedagogy, and disability studies. He is also passionate about facilitating professional development to help young music scholars succeed in the academic job market.
Hedy Law, Associate Professor of Musicology
Dr. Law’s research interests include eighteenth-century music and opera, the French Enlightenment, gender, Cantonese music, music and language, and global music history. She has published in the Journal of Musicology, Cambridge Opera Journal, the Opera Quarterly, Musique et Geste en France: De Lully à la Révolution, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Censorship, the Oxford Handbook on Music and the Body. Her book, Music, Pantomime, and Enlightenment France, was published by Boydell in 2020.
Anabel Maler, Assistant Professor of Music Theory
Dr. Maler has interests in disability and Deaf studies, sign language music, multi-sensory experiences of music gesture, form, and post-tonal music. She teaches on a variety of topics, including disability studies, voice studies, counterpoint, and music after 1945. Among her current projects is a book titled Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music (in press, Oxford). Her research can be found in places like Music Theory Online, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Intégral, and SMT-V (forthcoming).
David Metzer, Professor of Music History
Dr. Metzer’s research pursues a range of musical and social interests across classical music, popular music, and jazz in the 20th and 21st centuries. I am currently completing a book on music and incarceration that looks at how musicians across genres have confronted the toll of the prison system on American life. A colleague of mine joked that I make sharp turns in moving from one project to another. It might seem that way as the incarceration book follows a history of the ballad (The Ballad in American Popular Music: From Elvis to Beyoncé), which came after a study of modernism in recent works (Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty First Century), and that after a book on musical borrowing (Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music). Yes, the topics and repertoires are different, but certain interests run through them, including borrowing, emotional expression, music as a form of protest, modernism, and issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Above all, my work grows out of a restless curiosity to explore topics over broad musical and cultural terrains. I look forward to working with students who are similarly adventurous.
Laurel Parsons, Lecturer in Music Theory and Aural Skills
Dr. Parsons is co-editor with Brenda Ravenscroft of Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers, a 4-volume multi-author collection published by Oxford University Press. Her research has focused on analysis of music by 20th-century composers Elisabeth Lutyens and Else Marie Pade, and post-secondary aural skills challenges for music students with dyslexia.
Ève Poudrier, Assistant Professor Music Theory
Dr. Poudrier teaches courses on compositional practice in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, techniques of graphic linear analysis, and music psychology. Her research has been presented at interdisciplinary conferences in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, and published in Music Perception and Empirical Musicology Review. Dr. Poudrier’s current projects focus on empirical aesthetics, specifically the experience of listening to rhythmic polyphony and the aesthetics of complexity, combining methods of close study, computer-aided musicology, and behavioural experimentation.
Dylan Robinson, Associate Professor
Dr. Robinson’s work focuses on Indigenous art, interart collaboration, and forms of critical-creative writing. As a member of the Skwah First Nation, his scholarship, art, and writing seek to affirm Stó:lō epistemology. His book, Hungry Listening, examines Indigenous and settler colonial practices of listening, In his current research project, Caring for Our Ancestors, he works with Indigenous artists to reconnect kinship with Indigenous life incarcerated in museums.
Michael Tenzer, Professor, Ethnomusicology Director, Balinese Gamelan Ensemble
I try to keep things mixed up and have been active as a teacher, composer, performer, music theorist and ethnomusicologist over the years. I’ve long been associated with the gamelan community and co-founded Gamelan Sekar Jaya in 1979 in Berkeley, which is now thriving in its 45th year. My major publications have been two books on Balinese music (U. of Chicago Press; Periplus Editions), and two edited volumes for Oxford on the analysis of musics of many traditions. Since 2005 I have collaborated with my colleague John Roeder on comparative theory and analysis projects relating to musical cyclicity worldwide, resulting in many articles and a book in-progress. Other free-standing research publications consider general topics like Polyphony, Aesthetics, and Orchestration in comparative perspective My music has been performed in North America, Europe, and Asia by forces large and small; my compositions for Balinese gamelan have had something of an impact on the recent development of their tradition. I’ve advised a dozen ethnomusicology dissertations at UBC (3 more in-progress) and my students are well-employed, most in tenure track positions.
Leigh VanHandel, Associate Professor of Music Theory and Chair of the Music Theory Division
Dr. VanHandel’s research interests include music cognition, rhythm and meter, music theory pedagogy, computer applications in music research, music and language, and how those things all relate to one another.
Claudio Vellutini, Associate Professor
Dr. Vellutini’s research is focused on 19th-century opera in multiple European and global contexts. He has written about opera connections between Vienna and the Italian states, issues of operatic cosmopolitanism, translations, historic singers, and changing performance practices. A former violinist, he also loves teaching about instrumental repertoires in Europe and North America.