Chris Stover

Bio

photo by Lucas Hallel

I am a composer, trombonist, music scholar, and teacher. I’m currently finishing two books: a volume on transformative music theory teaching and learning called Reimagining Music Theory, which is under contract with Routledge as part of the College Music Society’s “Leading Change” series, and a volume titled Timeline Spaces, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. I am also finishing, with Garrett Michaelsen, an edited volume on analyzing musical interaction.

I’ve published articles in Analytical Approaches to World Music, Atos de pesquisa em educação, China Media Research, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Engaging Students, Journal of Jazz Studies, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Media and Culture, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Perspectives of New Music, The Open Space Magazine, and elsewhere, including chapters in the edited volumes Artistic Practice as Research in Jazz, Deleuze and Children, Improvisation and Music Education, The Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory, The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music, Pensar música, Queer Ear, and Sounds of Resistance.

I’m a co-editor of Rancière and Music (with João Pedro Cachopo and Patrick Nickleson; Edinburgh University Press, 2020), a special issue of Perspectives of New Music dedicated to John Rahn (with Scott Gleason and Jason Yust; 2019–2020), two issues of Engaging Students: Engaging Students Through Jazz (with Garrett Michaelsen and Dariusz Terefenko, 2016) and Beyond Western Musicalities (with Leslie Tilley and Anna Yu Wang, 2021), and a special issue of Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio (with Stefano Oliva, 2020).

I work as editor for Practice: the Magazine of the Institute for Creativity and as Critical Forum editor for Music Analysis. Along with Edward Campbell, I am co-series editor for Resonances: Critical Engagements with Music and Philosophy, a new book series with Edinburgh University Press. Please contact me using the link above if you have queries about any of these, especially if you are interested in contributing!

Between 2015 and 2016, I spent seven months in Brazil researching folkloric music as a Fulbright Teaching and Research Fellow, and I was a Fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School for Social Research during the 2016–17 academic year. More recently I was a Research Fellow in Music, Time and Consciousness at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Study in Rhythm, Time and Motion, University of Oslo.

I am also active internationally as a composer and performer, and have release seven CDs as a leader or co-leader, with two long-overdue new CDs (Helical Quartet and the Caetano Veloso Project) forthcoming in 2023. My recent set of chamber-jazz compositions concrete lines—fluid curves, based on poetry by Angélica Freitas, was performed recently in Seattle, New York City, and Brisbane. My compositions explore process, growth, flux, and recontextualization, with careful and nuanced considerations of the relationships between melody and harmony and the ways these relationships can change over time.

Most of my music can be found at Bandcamp. Please visit the individual project pages below too.

Projects

photo credits: aloizio jordão, chris stover, biddy healey, luzia grob dos santos

Published Essays

(many of these writings are behind paywalls; please email me if you cannot access something…)

‘Bins, Spans, and Tolerance: Three Theories of Microtiming Behaviors’ (Music Theory Spectrum, 2023)

‘Calls and Responses’ (Music Analysis Critical Forum ‘Three Projections: Christopher Hasty’s Meter as Rhythm at 25, 2023)

‘Guattari’s Sonorous Affect’ (China Media Research, 2022)

‘Jazz, Improvisation, Community: the Affective Constitution of Social Identity’ (Community Music—Musical Ecologies in Action, 2022)

‘Radical Music Theory’ (Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, 2022)

‘Politicking Musical Time’ (Oxford Handbook of Time in Music, 2022)

‘Improvisation in the in-between: Jazz, Affect, and Artistic Research’ (Pensar Música: Performance, Improvisação e Inovação, 2021) (link downloads pdf)

‘The Queer Rhythm of Cecil Taylor’s ‘Enter Evening’’ (Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2021)

‘Mapping Jazz’s Affect: Implications for Music Theory and Analysis’ (Artistic Practice as Research in Jazz, 2021)

‘Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence’ (Machinic Assemblages of Desire: Deleuze and Artistic Research, 2020)

‘Can We Learn to Hear Multi-Metrically?’ (Engaging Students 8: Beyond Western Musicalities, 2020)

‘Introduction: Beyond Western Musicalities’ (Engaging Students 8: Beyond Western Musicalities, 2020; with Maya Cunningham, Dylan Robinson, Leslie Tilley, and Anna Yu Wang)

‘Music theory teaches us how to hear: can it help us hear each other?’ (Practice: The Magazine of the CTA Institute for Creativity, 2020)

‘Rancière’s Affective Impropriety’ (Rancière and Music, 2020)

‘Introduction’ (Rancière and Music, 2020, with João Pedro Cachopo and Patrick Nickleson)

‘Deterritorialize Yourself!’ (Perspectives of New Music, 2019-20)

‘Music as Nomad Research’ (Atos de pesquisa em educação, 2019)

‘Contextual Theory, or Theorizing Between the Discursive and the Material’ (Analytical Approaches to World Music: special issue on Analysis and Ethnography, ed. Yonatan Malin and Chris Stover, 2019)

‘Affect, Play, and Becoming-Musicking’ (Deleuze and Children, 2019)

‘Theorizing Fundamental Music/Dance Interactions in Salsa’ (Music Theory Spectrum, 2019; with Rebecca Simpson-Litke)

‘Sun Ra's Mystical Time’ (The Open Space Magazine, 2018)

‘Affect and Improvising Bodies’ (Perspectives of New Music, 2017)

‘Jazz Theory's Pragmatics’ (The Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory, 2017)

‘Time, Territorialization, and Improvisational Spaces’ (Music Theory Online, 2017)

‘Capturing the Ineffable: Three Transcriptions of a Jazz Solo’ (Music Theory Online, 2016; with René Rusch and Keith Salley)

‘Strange Changes’ (Engaging Students, 2016)

‘Musical Bodies: Corporeality, Emergent Subjectivity, and Improvisational Spaces’ (M/C Journal, 2016)

‘Walking Up and Over: Approaching Ben Boretz’s Qixingshan’ (The Open Space Magazine, 2015–16)

‘Analysis, Improvisation, and Openness’ (Improvisation and Music Education: Beyond the Classroom, 2015)

‘Jazz Harmony: A Progress Report’ (Journal of Jazz Studies, 2014–15)

‘The Subversive Songs of Bossa Nova: Tom Jobim in the Era of Censorship’ (Analytical Approaches to World Music, 2014; with Irna Priore)

‘Reading and Sounding Protest: Musical and Lyrical Markers in Brazilian Tropicália and Canção Engajada’ (Sounds of Resistance, 2013)

‘Analysis as Multiplicity’ (Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, 2013)

‘A Theory of Flexible Rhythmic Spaces for Diasporic African Music’ (PhD Thesis, 2009) (link downloads PDF)

Reviews

Review-Essay: ‘For an Equi-vocal Becoming: Danielle Sofer’s Sex Sounds and Affective Politics (Extreme Anthropology, 2023)

Review-Essay: Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music by Mariusz Kozak (Music Theory Spectrum, 2023)

Review-Essay: Dig That Lick: Analyzing Large-Scale Data for Melodic Patterns in Jazz Performances (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2021)

Review: Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis by Judy Lochhead (Music Theory Online, 2016)

Review-Essay: The Philosophy of Improvisation by Gary Peters (Music Theory Spectrum, 2013)

Review-Essay: The Clave Matrix: Afro-Cuban Rhythm: Its Principles and African Origins by David Peñalosa (Latin American Music Review, 2012)

Review: The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet: 1965–68, by Keith Waters (Music Theory Online, 2012)

Other Writings

‘Julius Eastman’s Femenine’ (talk and program note, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, 2023)

‘Sun Ra, Queer Afrofabulation, and Music Theory’ (paper given for the Society for Music Theory Queer Resource Interest Group, 2022)

‘When is Samba Samba?: ‘Musical Premises’ in Carlos Sandroni’s Feitiço Decente’ (presentation for Music Theory in the Plural virtual symposium, organized by Anna Yu Wang and Chris Stover, 2022)

‘Fabulated Culture (“(Uit)gevonden cultuur”)’ (360º Berio, MATRIX Centrum voor neuwe Muziek, 2021)

‘Birdsongs, frog orchestras, and forks’ (invited talk for the Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference, 2021)

‘Minor languages, minor practices’ (paper given for the Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network, 2021)

‘Artistic research in jazz: eight themes for undisciplinary practices’ (paper given for the Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network, 2021)

‘Rancière and Music’ book launch remarks (virtual launch with Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

‘Music(ology) between bodies’ (paper given at the 13th Deleuze and Guattari conference, 2020)

‘On heteroglossia, double consciousness and music’ (lecture recap, Modern Jazz Since Bebop, 2020)

‘Introduction: Between Music and Language’ (with Stefano Oliva; Editors’ Introduction to special issue of Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio, 2020)

‘Introduction’ (Perspectives of New Music special double issue on/around John Rahn at 75, ed. Scott Gleason, Chris Stover, and Jason Yust, 2019-20)

‘Rhythm and Meter’ (SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, 2019)

‘Structural Analysis’ (SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, 2019)

‘Tatuando o samba (Tattooing the samba)’ (paper given at the American Musicological Society Annual Conference, 2018)

‘Ariadne’s Futures’ (for the opening of Tomás Saraceno’s Palais de Tokyo exhibit, 2018)

‘Heidegger, De-distancing, and Music Analysis’ (lecture recap; Philosophies of Time & Process, 2018)

‘Eight Axioms for a Theory of Timeline Spaces’ (keynote paper given at the University of Oslo, 2017)

‘Subject and Self’ (lecture recap on Deleuze’s syntheses of time; Philosophies of Time & Process, 2017)

‘Christopher Hasty’s Meter as Rhythm’ (English version; published in German in Musikschrifttum vol. 1, ‘Musiktheorie’, 2017)

‘Notes on Saariaho's Passion de Simone’ (The New School for Social Research, 2016)

‘Affect Theory’ (Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: an Encyclopedia, 2014)

‘Chris Stover’ (Interview with Rachel Vandagriff for Perspectives of New Music 50th Anniversary Issue, 2012)

Teaching

I teach courses in music theory, musicology, philosophy, methodology and research design, composition, and arranging. Here are a few courses I have taught over the last ten years:

• Analysis of World Music

• Analytical Techniques

• Arranging Fundamentals

• Artistic Research Design

• Artistic Research Methods

• Composers Forum

• Modern Jazz Since 1945

• Music and Gender

• Music in World Culture

• Phenomenology and Subjectification

• Philosophies of Time and Process

• Progressive Currents in Twentieth-Century Music

• Twentieth Century Modernisms

And many courses in the core Music Theory and Aural Studies curriculum.

Following a year of intensive one-on-one lessons with the inimitable teacher and musician Andy Wasserman, I am certified to teach George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.

I’ve been very deeply involved in course and curriculum design for the undergraduate Music Theory and Aural Studies core. I currently convene the first-year curriculum, where I have been designing and implementing a radically broad-based, project-oriented approach involving critical listening, practice-based analysis, and pluralities of musical practices and contexts. I’ll be linking to a number of materials here in the months to come.

I’ve published a number of pedagogy-related articles, including in the Journal of Jazz Studies, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, the Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory, and two special issues of Engaging Students which I help organize and edit. (See ‘writing’ above.)

I recently contributed to a workshop for the American Musicological Society on ‘global music history’, contributing a syllabus and lesson plans on the subject of thinking about musical modernism from a global perspective. I’ve also organized sessions for the Society for Music Theory’s Analysis of World Music and Improvisation interest groups on topics related to the classroom.

For five years I co-taught a week-long summer intensive, "“The ABCs of Latin Music (Argentina, Cuba, Brazil) at Cornish College of Arts in Seattle, alongside Jovino Santos Neto and Ben Thomas. I have also taught numerous summer jazz workshops around the United States.

I have held guest artist and/or guest scholar residencies at the University of Olso, Florida State University (Tallahassee), University of Georgia (Athens, GA), Washington University (St. Louis), Victorian College of Arts (Melbourne), Elon University (Elon, NC), Universidade Federal Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte), Universidade Federal Rio de Janeiro, Conservatório musical Souza LIma (São Paulo), Escuela de Música Fernando Sor (Bogotá), Stricker School of Music (Tel Aviv), Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (Melbourne), Ritmisk Musikkonservatorium (Aarhus), Escola de Jazz de Torres Vedra (La Plata), University of Queensland (Brisbane), Sønderborg Academy of Music (Sønderborg), and Eastman School of Music (Rochester).

I’m also on the executive board for the Common Tone Arts Institute for Creativity, through whom I edit Practice Magazine. If you have ideas for a contribution you’d like to make to Practice Magazine, please contact me through the form linked at the top of the page: I’m keen to work with you on a project!

And please reach out to via the form linked above for lessons, consulting, or guest talks, workshops, or residencies.

Stay tuned for a range of materials, links, and other teaching-and-learning related materials…

 Media

‘Decolonizing Music Theory: A conversation with Gavin Lee and Chris Stover’ (Dec 2022)

‘Taking Music: Always in motion is the future’ (panel on music improvisation, Creative Arts Research Institute, Griffith University, 2022)

Interview with Rachel Elliott (‘Sound it Out’, Critical Studies in Improvisation & CFRU 93.3FM, 2018)

‘Thoughts around a politics of improvised music’ (directed by Orfeus Skutelis, Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought, The New School for Social Research, 2017)

‘Affect and Improvising Bodies’ (New School Minute, 2014)

Earshot Jazz feature by Danielle Bias (2012)

Here is a recent video from Charles Cornell’s terrific CornellMusicAcademy.com that draws upon my article with Irna Priore on Tom Jobim and Chico Buarque!

Here is a terrific review from back in the day: Bill Barton writing for Seattle Jazz Scene. A choice quote:

“Stover seems to be out of the Roswell Rudd to Ray Anderson lineage when it comes to his phrasing and ideas but possesses the tonal clarity and fleet agility of J. J. Johnson and his followers. He’s a thoughtful and original improviser. Another parallel is Jimmy Knepper who is similarly cliché free.”