Arved Ashby

Area: Musicology
Arved Ashby

Arved Ashby, associate professor, Fulbright scholar, and AMS 50 fellow, received his Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University with a dissertation on Alban Berg's "Lyric Suite." He has continued work on the historiography of twelve-tone music, and in 1996 received the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society for an article on Berg's methodological connections with his teacher Schoenberg. He designed, edited and contributed to the recent collection "The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology" (University of Rochester Press, 2004). In addition to modernism throughout the 20th century, he has explored topics relating to music theatre (an essay on "Minimalist Opera"), popular culture ("P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights and the Music of Pornography," soon to be published), intellectual history ("Nationalist and Post-Nationalist Perspectives in American Musicology"), cultural studies ("Frank Zappa and the Anti-Fetishist Orchestra"), and more specifically film music (editing an anthology of essays entitled "Popular Music and the Auteur after MTV.") Soon to appear is his monograph under the title "Absolute Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which explores the phenomenological, McLuhanesque connections between Western concert music and the mass media ranging from 78 rpm records to the iPod. He wrote criticism for the "American Record Guide" from 1987 to 2001, and has contributed more recently to "Gramophone." He also composes.