The Planning Committee—Members of the Symposium

Lawrence Zbikowski, Associate Professor of Music, University of Chicago, is a music theorist whose research focuses on applying work in cognitive science to various problems confronted by music scholars, including the nature of musical syntax, text-music relations, musical ontology, and the structure of theories of music.

His research is drawn together in his recent book, Conceptualizing Music: Cognition, Theory, and Analysis (Oxford, 2002), which won the 2004 Wallace Berry Award of the Society of Music Theory. His research focuses on the application of recent work in cognitive science (especially that done by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists) to various problems confronted by music scholars. These problems include the nature of musical syntax, text-music relations, the organization of improvisational traditions, and the structure of theories of music.

During 2003-2004 he was a fellow at the National Humanities Center, where his project concerned the development of a cognitive grammar of music. This work is the subject of his next book, By Crystal Fountains: Music, Language, and Grammar. He is presently director of a special project for the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities on creativity and cognition.

Dr. Zbikowski has also worked on the theory of popular music, and he is the director of the Humanities Division's project on Creativity and Cognition.

Dr. Zbikowski also has experience as a practical musician. Although most of his energies are directed toward classical guitar, he has explored somewhat lighter fare as a member of the South Side Swedes, led by John Berquist.

:: Back to Planning Committee ::