John Rahn's home page

News

I am a Professor of Music in the University of Washington School of Music, Seattle. I am (bio here) a composer of music and a music theorist.

In January 2001, I resumed the Editorship of (click here) Perspectives of New Music , an international professional journal for composers and others interested in contemporary music.

I am also on the Advisory Board for the new European-American Journal of Mathematics and Music. An invited keynote article in its first issue appeared in Spring 2007, called “Cool Tools: polysemic and noncommutative nets, subchain decompositions and cross-projecting partial orders, object-graphs, chain-hom-sets and chain-label-hom-sets, forgetful functors, free categories, and ghosts.” There is an associated new Society of Mathematics and Computation in Music which held its initial conference in Berlin May 18 - 20, 2007. I helped with its program and delivered a keynote address, "Approaching Musical Actions," which is in press for Volume 45, number 2 of Perspectives of New Music.

In November 2006 I gave a paper on Deleuze and repetition for the SMT Philosophy Group in LA. This session led to a full session at SMT in Nov. 2007 in Baltimore, at which I presented a paper called "Mille Plateaux, You Tarzan: A Musicology of (an Anthropology of (an Anthropology of A Thousand Plateaus))." This will appear in PNM along with some other papers from that session.

I was on sabbatical leave during the 2003-2004 academic year. From October through March in 2003-2004 I was associated with the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain.

In October through December 2003 I visited Paris (from Barcelona) for some conferences, giving a keynote address for a conference about music and mathematics at the Institut Recherche et Coordination Acoustique-Musique (IRCAM). See this link for more information.

Research

Here are some recent articles:

• “Cool Tools: polysemic and noncommutative nets, subchain decompositions and cross-projecting partial orders, object-graphs, chain-hom-sets and chain-label-hom-sets,forgetful functors, free categories, and ghosts,” Journal of Mathematics and Music , volume 1, number 1 (2007).
• "UN(-) Ravelled, Or, The Hidden Dragon." Perspectives of New Music special double issue, Vol. 43, no. 2 (2005) and 44, number 1 (2006), in press.
• "Chloe's Friends: A Symposium on Music and Mathematics", Perspectives of New Music Vol. 41, no. 2 (2003).
• "The Swerve and the Flow: Music's Relation to Mathematics", Perspectives of New Music Vol. 42, no. 1 (2004).

I composed an opera called The New Mother , of which I am now preparing a fair score. In 2005 I composed trombone duet, based on ancient Greek music theory, called Greek Bones, which was premiered by Chris Stover and Don Immel. (Let me know if you want to play this.)

A book of selected essays called Music Inside Out: Going Too Far in Musical Essays appeared in 2001, in the Gordon and Breach Arts International series, "Critical Voices".

Some other theoretical work includes an article called "Composing and the Sense of Self" (click here to view), a book called Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics (editor), W. W. Norton, N.Y. 1994, and an article called "Some Remarks on Network Models for Music" in Musical Transformations and Intuitions: A Festschrift for David Lewin , ed. Raphael Atlas and Michael Cherlin, Pendragon Press, 1995.

Here are some papers on cultural theory.

Some of my research and composition has involved computers. You can download or hear some of my computer music compositions in .wav or streamed in .wma soundfiles here.

You can follow this link, updated in August 1999, to get my Lisp Kernel and related software.

Teaching

At the UW I teach composition and theory. I am currently (Winter 2008) teaching Music 301
, the second-year Core Theory class, and Music 575, a seminar called "Hypermeter and the Rhythm of Form (and what about dance?)"

In Winter 2007, I taught a double or triple interdisciplinary seminar on music and philosophy, jointly with Comparative Literature Professor Marshall Brown. Here is its web site:
Music 575/576/CLIT502

In Autumn 2006 I taught a class analyzing Janacek and Stravinsky, and a seminar on ancient Greek music theory.

In W 2002 and again in Fall 2004 and 2005 at the UW I taught a seminar on music and mathematics. In Winter 2003 I taught a different seminar on this subject, focussing on two recent books, Guerino Mazzola's The Topos of Music and Michael Leyton's A Generative Theory of Shape . I am teaching this again in 2004 and 2005; here are syllabi from 2002 and 2005.

At ESMUC in Barcelona during 2003-4, I taught composition and a public seminar in music and mathematics. One of my composition students, Joan Robuste, won the International Guinjoan Composition Award at the end of 2003. In addition to advising graduate students at the University of Washington, I served as First Reader on the doctoral committee for the Paris Ph.D. dissertation of Moreno Andreatta (at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), and am advising Harvard Ph.D. student Jon Wild.

During 2003 and 2003 I also taught two advanced seminars on Heinrich Schenker and seminars on advanced serial theory.

Here is a Winter 2005 syllabus on History of Music Theory, Ancient through Medieval, with particular reference to Greek music theory.

Here are links to some other course materials from recent years.