Audrey Slote

Audrey Slote is a music theorist who studies questions of music and the political, which she approaches from philosophical, historical, and analytical angles. Her current research focuses on the question of how music theory can grasp music’s political and social resonances, and includes a critical reexamination of music theory in the United States since the 1960s as an intellectual history with its own emergent set of values. Slote’s analytic approach joins techniques for analyzing musical form, rhythm, and timbre with Marxist formalisms and phenomenology. She studies a diverse set of repertoires that arose from moments of political upheaval, from the Italian avant garde during fascism to music featuring women’s voices in the #MeToo era.

Slote comes to music theory from a background as a cellist. She holds degrees in performance from St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota, as well as a Masters in music theory from the University of Minnesota, and performed as a freelance musician throughout the Twin Cities area before beginning her PhD at the University of Chicago.

• Sound and Society
• EthNoise

• MUSI 15100, 15200, 15300 (CA, 2021-2022)