Thomas Christensen’s scholarly research centers on the history of music theory. Fundamental to his work has been a desire to situate the many intellectual frames, arguments and linguistic models used by writers in the early modern period deeply within cultural discourses. Hence, as one example, Christensen’s 1993 monograph on Jean-Philippe Rameau attempts to analyze his music theory as a complex response to both the empirical as well as synthetic values of Enlightenment science. Other key articles over the years have concerned the writings of the 17th-century savants, Marin Mersenne and Seth Calvisius, thorough-bass theory and practice in the 18th century; problems in the historiography of music theory; and the history and social aesthetics of playing piano transcriptions in the 19th century. Many of these articles have recently been reprinted in a volume that was published in 2014 entitled “The Work of Music Theory.” He has also attempted more synthetic surveys of historical music theory, particularly as editor of the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (published in 2003; translations into Macedonian and Chinese).
Christensen’s research has received support and recognition over the years from a variety of academic associations and funding agencies. In 2011-12, he spent a year as Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. More recently, Christensen received Fellowships from the the ACLS (2015) and the Guggenheim Foundation (2019) to support his most recent book concerning the concept of tonality as first elaborated by the Belgian music scholar, Joseph Fétis, and its reception in the 19th-century (Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis University of Chicago Press, 2019). An active citizen in the broader intellectual community of music scholars, Christensen has served as President of the Society for Music Theory (1999-2001) and as a member of the Executive Board of the American Musicological Society. Over his scholarly career, he has worked energetically to further collaborative ties with German and French scholars in music. In 2019-20 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Statliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin Germany.