David Kopp

Associate Professor of Music, Composition and Music Theory

David Kopp is Associate Professor in the Department of Composition and Theory and head of the graduate music theory program at the Boston University School of Music. His research interests include chromaticism, systems of harmony, Neo-Riemannan theory, 20th– and 21st-century music, history of theory, and performance and analysis. He is the author of Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press, 2002). More recent notable publications include “Intermediate States of Key in Schumann,” in Rethinking Schumann (Oxford University Press, 2011), “Chromaticism and the Question of Tonality”, in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Theories (OUP, recipient of a Society for Music Theory publication award, 2011), “Aspects of Organization in Petites esquisses d’oiseaux”, in Messiaen Perspectives 2 (Ashgate, 2013), and “On Performing Chopin’s Barcarolle,” in Music Theory Online (2014). He is immediate past chair of the Performance and Analysis Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory and past president of the New England Conference of Music Theorists. As pianist he has performed extensively as soloist and chamber musician. He has recorded primarily 20th-century American music for the New World, CRI, and Arsis labels, and appears regularly with duo partner, flutist James Winn. Prof. Kopp holds a BA in music from Harvard University, an MM in piano performance from SUNY-Stony Brook, where he studied with Charles Rosen, and a PhD in music theory and musicology from Brandeis University. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger and her circle in Paris and Fontainebleau, and has taught previously at Yale University and the University of Washington.