Landon Morrison
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
BIOGRAPHY
Landon Morrisonis a music theorist who studies the role of technological mediation in 20th- and 21st-century sonic practices, focusing on digital instruments, timbre, microtonality, and popular music. His research aims to develop an interdisciplinary perspective on new musical media by bringing theory into dialogue with surrounding discourses from science, technology, and cultural studies, and by combining analytical approaches with historiography, archival work, and ethnographic methods.
Morrison recently won an Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory in recognition of his 2021 article in Music Theory Online detailing the creative processes behind early computer-based music by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Other recent publications include articles for Archival Notes (forthcoming), Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies (2022), Circuit: musiques contemporaine (2018, 2019), and Nuove Musiche (2018), as well as a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Time in Music (2021) and an hour-long episode for the inaugural season of SMT-Pod: The Society for Music Theory Podcast (2022). Morrison has also given regular presentations at international conferences, including the annual meetings for the Society of Music Theory, American Musicological Society, Electroacoustic Music Studies Network, European Music Analysis Conference, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
After completing a PhD in Music Theory at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, Morrison began teaching at the Harvard University Department of Music, where he has served as a post-doctoral College Fellow (2019-21), Lecturer (2021-23), and Director of Undergraduate Studies (2022-23). He will spend the 2023-2024 academic year at Imperial College London doing research as part of a European Research Council grant project on digital music instrument design and analysis. In the following year (2024-25), he is excited to move to Rochester, NY and begin teaching as an Assistant Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music.