People | Faculty | Steven Rings

Steven Rings

Appointment:

Assistant Professor of Music

Education:

Ph.D., Yale, 2006

Contact:

Office: Goodspeed Hall 304
Phone: (773) 702-8577
Email: srings@uchicago.edu
Website:

Photo: Daniel Collins

Steven Rings’s research focuses on transformational theory, phenomenology, and questions of music and meaning. Animating all of his work is an abiding interest in the relationship between “technical” music theory and more broadly humanistic inquiries into music as a cultural practice. That issue is at the heart of a book project that he is now beginning on the hermeneutics of music analysis. His first book, Tonality and Transformation--which develops transformational models of tonal hearing, and applies them in analyses of works by Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, and Brahms--is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. In recent work he’s focused on the music of Debussy and Bob Dylan, and engaged with the writings of Vladimir Jankélévitch. Recent graduate seminars have covered topics such as Lewinian transformational theory, semiotics, and the music of Bela Bartók. Rings also teaches tonal and post-tonal theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as a course on musical interpretation and criticism in the college Core. Before his work as a music theorist, Rings was active as a classical guitarist, performing in the U.S. and in Portugal, where he was Professor of Guitar at the Conservatório Regional de Angra do Heroísmo.

Recent Courses Taught

  • Music 31200, Tonal Analysis II (Spring 2008)
  • Music 43808, Seminar: Analyzing Meaning (Fall 2007)
  • Music 31300, Post-Tonal Analysis (Spring 2007)
  • Music 43707, Seminar: Lewinian Transformational Theory (Winter 2007)
  • Music 25300, Analysis of Twentieth-Century Music (Spring 2008)
  • Music 15200, Harmony and Voice-Leading II (Winter 2008, 2007, 2006)
  • Music 10400, Music Analysis and Criticism (Fall 2006)

Selected Works

  • Tonality and Transformation, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  • "The Learned Self: Artifice in Brahms's Late Intermezzi," in Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning, ed. Heather Platt and Peter Smith, forthcoming.
  • “Mystéres limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige,” forthcoming in 19th-Century Music.
  • "Riemannian Analytical Values, Paleo- and Neo-," in The Oxford Handbook of Riemannian and Neo-Riemannian Studies: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Alexander Rehding and Edward Gollin, forthcoming.
  • “Perspectives on Tonality and Transformation in Schubert’s Impromptu in E-flat, D. 899,” Journal of Schenkerian Studies 2 (2007).
  • Review of David Lewin, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, Musical Form and Transformation: Four Analytic Essays, and Studies in Music with Text, Journal of Music Theory 50.1 (2006).