Ben Britton, DMA (Eastman School of Music) has held adjunct positions at various institutions including the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include non-functional harmony in tonal and post-tonal jazz, the application of saxophone acoustics to saxophone performance, and the pedagogical intersections of theory, aural skills, and improvisation. He is also an active performer and composer, currently exploring the use of set classes, intervallic cycles, and canonic imitation.
Shersten Johnson is Associate Professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul where she teaches music theory and composition. Her research interests include disability studies, embodied cognition, and the analysis of twentieth-century art song and opera. She has published articles on the music of Benjamin Britten in Music and Letters, PsyArt, and the Journal of Music and Meaning, and on the subject of music analysis and blindness in Music Theory Online and the Oxford Handbook on Music and Disability Studies.
Garrett Michaelsen is Assistant Professor of Musicianship and Music Theory at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. With colleagues, he designed a new, integrated theory and ear training sequence called “Musicianship and Analysis” that is centered on authentic and creative classroom activities and assessments. He has written and presented on numerous facets of improvisation in music, including how improvisations may be understood as products of interactional group processes.
Joon Park is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Arkansas, where he joined the faculty in 2016. His research interest includes jazz analysis and history of music theory. He holds the Ph.D. in music theory from the University of Oregon (2015).
Rich Pellegrin is Assistant Teaching Professor of Music Theory at the University of Missouri, where he teaches courses in music theory, jazz, and improvisation. He has presented research on topics such as fractals, John Coltrane, and neo-Riemannian theory at regional, national, and international conferences and his essays appear in volumes by Cambridge Scholars Publishing and KFU Publishing House. Also active as a jazz pianist and composer, Rich’s second album for Origin Records’ OA2 label was released in 2014. He holds a Ph.D. in music theory from the University of Washington.
Chris Stover is Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the New School College of Performing Arts, where he runs the jazz theory curriculum. He is also a busy composer and trombonist in New York City.
Described by Jazz Times as “perhaps THE most innovative straight-ahead jazz guitarist to emerge in years…,” Rory Stuart is a New York-based jazz guitarist and composer with critically acclaimed recordings as a leader who has performed around the world. A Fulbright scholar and recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, he is the recipient of the Teaching Excellence award at New School, where he designed and has taught the rhythm curriculum in the Dept. of Jazz and Contemporary Music since 1992. Rory is currently writing a multi-volume rhythm book series for students of all instruments.
Dariusz Terefenko is Associate Professor of Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media, and the chair of the Advanced Certificate in the Art of Improvisation at the Eastman School of Music. He is also an active jazz pianist and composer.
Margaret Thomas is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Connecticut College, where she teaches courses in the core theory sequence along with general education courses that situate the study of music within the liberal arts. Her research focuses on issues of rhythm and time.
Keith Waters is Professor of Music Theory at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is the author of The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet: 1965-68 (Oxford University Press), co-author of Jazz: The First Hundred Years (Schirmer/Cengage), and has contributed entries to the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. He has written numerous articles pertaining to jazz of the 1960s, and is a founding member of the Jazz Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory, formed in 1995. As a jazz pianist, Waters has recorded and performed throughout the U.S., Europe, and in Russia.