Orion Series in Fine Arts Lecture
Janet Schmalfeldt, music theorist
Brahms and the Unreliable Narrative

Janet Schmalfeldt (PhD Yale, 1979) is a prominent music theorist and pianist. She is the author of a book on Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck (Yale University Press, 1983) and has published widely on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music. Her book In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford University Press, 2011) received a 2012 ASCAP – Deems Taylor Award and the 2012 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory. She has served as President of the New England Conference of Music Theorists and as President of the Society for Music Theory. As an invited speaker, she has held seminars and workshops on musical form, performance, and analysis in Brazil, Italy, and the Netherlands and has given papers in Estonia, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Belgium, and England.