Gregory Butler joined the faculty in 1973 after two years as Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, where he studied with Christoph Wolff. He was winner of the first Canada Council Doctoral Dissertation Prize and a Canada-Belgium Exchange Fellowship. He spent 1984-85 and 1990-91 in Berlin as a Von Humboldt fellow.

His scholarly publications (In Musical Quarterly, Bach-Jahrbuch, Studi Musicali, Journal of Music Theory and Journal of Musicology) concern music and rhetoric, Baroque keyboard music and, especially, the original editions of J.S. Bach’s music, an area in which he is a leading authority.