Christopher Hasty
Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music
Theory
hasty@fas.harvard.edu
Paine Hall 3
617-495-2692

Professor Hasty received his Ph.D. in Music Theory from Yale University, after earning an M.M. in Composition from the Yale School of Music.  Prior to attending Yale, he studied Composition with Wolfgang Fortner and Bassoon with Johannes Zuther at Freiburg Musikhochschule, and he received his B.M. from Stetson University, Pi Kappa Lambda.  Professor Hasty has taught at Rutgers University, Yale University, where he founded the undergraduate Performance of Chamber Music program, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and directed the College House Music Program.  He joined the Harvard faculty in 2002 as the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music. 

Professor Hasty’s scholarly work engages problems in the theory and analysis of music from the 16th to the 20th centuries from the standpoint of process and experience. His book, Meter as Rhythm (1997) won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory.  His current research interests include process philosophy, poetic prosody, and ecological and post-cognitivist psychology.  Most recently his publications include “The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music” in Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, eds. Brian Hulse, Nick Nesbit (2010); “If Music is Ongoing Experience, What Might Music Theory Be: A Suggestion from the Drastic” in Musiktheorie/ Musikwissenschaft: Geschichte-Methoden-Perspectiven, eds. Tobias Janz, Jan Sprick (2011); “From Object to Event” in Im Fokus der Perspektiven, Anton Weberns sechste Bagatelle, ed. Simon Obert, in press (2012); “Learning in Time” in Visions of Research in Music Education, vol. 20 (2012); and “Rhythmicizing the Subject” in Musical Implications: Essays in Honor of Eugene Narmour, eds. Lawrence Bernstein, Alexander Rozin, forthcoming (2012).

Among works now in progress are a book on the rhythmic formation of event, Thinking with Rhythm, and a proposal for a process-oriented theory of poetic prosody for the forthcoming volume The Nature of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics, eds. Andrew Hamilton, Max Paddison(2013).  Professor Hasty is currently preparing an international conference for the cross-cultural study of musical rhythm with Professors Richard Wolfe (Harvard) and Stephen Blum (NYU). In summer 2012 he will be participating in a research project sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation for the study of temporal-spatial organization in music and image.