Ithaca College

Roger Matthew Grant (BM Theory, 2005, summa cum laude) received the prestigious Society for Music Theory Emerging Scholar Award on Saturday at the annual meeting in Vancouver for his book, Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era. 

According to the citation read by the chair of the awards committee, Grant's book "chronicles the evolving conceptualizations of meter from the late Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, and into the early nineteenth century. Drawing on sources from the histories of music theory and natural philosophy, ... the book traces a paradigm shift in which a concept of meter theorized through Aristotelian ideas of motion or embodied action is replaced by a theory of meter informed by a Newtonian concept of absolute time ... . An interdisciplinary study, the work explores not only the philosophical questions surrounding the description and representation of musical time, but also the practical ramifications various understandings of meter have for musical performance."

After his studies at Ithaca College, Grant received the PhD in Music Theory from the University of Pennsylvania (2010) and is now Assistant Professor of Music, Wesleyan University. The Department of Music Theory, History, and Composition congratulates him on his achievement and is proud to have Roger as an alumnus of Ithaca College and School of Music.