People | Faculty | Lawrence Zbikowski

Lawrence Zbikowski

Appointment:

Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College

Education:

Ph.D., Yale University, 1991

Contact:

Office: Goodspeed 202
Phone: (773) 702-8788
Email: larry@uchicago.edu
Website: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/zbikowski/

Photo: Daniel Collins

My principal research interests involve applying recent work in cognitive science (especially that done by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists) to various problems confronted by music scholars, with a particular focus on music theory and analysis. My recent seminars have focused on issues in the analysis of popular music, on correlations between music and social dance, on text-music relationships in song, and on connections between music and the emotions. I also teach analysis courses that deal with a range of music, but lately have focused on music of the 18th and 19th centuries.

During 2003-2004 I was a fellow at the National Humanities Center, where my project concerned the development of a cognitive grammar of music. This work is the subject of my next book, By Crystal Fountains: Music, Language, and Grammar (the title of which makes reference to one of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s fantasies about the relationship between music and language). I will be co-chair, with David Huron, of the 2009 Mannes Institute on music and the mind, where I will also serve as a member of the faculty.

Recent Courses Taught

  • Song (seminar)—Spring 2006
  • Harmony and voice leading I—Autumn 2007
  • The analysis of song—Autumn 2007
  • Introduction to cognitive musicology—Winter 2008
  • Music and emotion (seminar)—Spring 2008

Selected Works

  • “Music, Language, and Multimodal Metaphor.” In Multimodal Metaphor, edited by Charles Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, (in press).
  • “Metaphor and Music.” In The Cambridge Handbook on Metaphor, edited by Ray Gibbs, Jr., 502-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2008).
  • “Dance Topoi, Sonic Analogues, and Musical Grammar: Communicating with Music in the Eighteenth Century.” In Communication in Eighteenth Century Music, edited by V. Kofi Agawu and Danuta Mirka, 283–309. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
  • “Cognitive Science, Music Theory, and Music Analysis.” In Musiktheorie im Kontext: V. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie Hamburg 2005, edited by Jan Philipp Sprick, Reinhard Bahr, and Michael von Troschke, 447-63. Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag, 2008.
  • “The Cognitive Tango.” In The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, edited by Mark Turner, 115–31. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • “Modelling the Groove: Conceptual Structure and Popular Music.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129, no. 2 (2004): 272–97.
  • Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. This book was winner of the Society for Music Theory’s 2004 Wallace Berry Award.
  • “Music Theory, Multimedia, and the Construction of Meaning.” Intégral 16/17 (2002–3): 251–68.
  • “The Blossoms of ‘Trockne Blumen’: Music and Text in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Music Analysis 18, no. 3 (October 1999): 307–45.
  • “Musical Coherence, Motive, and Categorization.” Music Perception 17, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 5–42.