Alan Dodson
Biography
Dr. Alan Dodson is an alumnus of the Music program at Mount Allison and holds graduate degrees in piano performance and music scholarship from the University of Western Ontario. After completing a two-year Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta, he taught in the School of Music at the University of British Columbia for fourteen years, including two years as Chair of the Music Theory Division. He joined the Mount A Music Department in 2019.
Dr. Dodson's research interests include the analysis of recorded music, theories of musical rhythm and temporality, and the studio teaching of the Viennese music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868‒1935). He has presented conference papers and guest lectures on four continents and published peer-reviewed articles in seven academic journals. He recently completed a chapter on visual representations of expressive timing for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Rhythm and is now working on an annotated translation of Schenker’s lesson books from the 1920s for Schenker Documents Online. He is an active member of the Society for Music Theory and serves on the advisory panel of Oxford Music Online and on the editorial boards of Music Theory Spectrum, Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music, and Գé.
Dr. Dodson teaches Materials of Music I‒IV and Analytical Techniques.
Publications
(selected)
“Performance, Grouping, and Schenkerian Alternative Readings in Some Passages from Beethoven’s ‘Lebewohl’ Sonata, Op. 81a.” Music Analysis 27 (2008): 107–34. []
“Metrical Dissonance and Directed Motion in Paderewski’s Recordings of Chopin’s Mazurkas.” Journal of Music Theory 53 (2009): 57–94. []
“Solutions to the ‘Great Nineteenth-Century Rhythm Problem’ in Horowitz’s Recording of the Theme from Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16, No. 2.” Music Theory Online 18, no. 1 (April 2012). [] []
Heinrich Schenker, Lessonbook of 1919‒20. Annotated translation. Schenker Documents Online (2019).
“Visualizing the Rhythms of Performance.” Forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm, ed. Russell Hartenberger and Ryan McClelland, 41–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [] []
“‘So Free as to Seem Improvised’: Rhythmic Revisions and Kinetic Form in Debussy’s Recording of D'un cahier d'esquisses.” In Claude Debussys Aufnahmen eigener Klavierwerke, ed. Tihomir Popovic. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag. [] [] []
Education
Ph.D. (Music), University of Western Ontario, 2003
M.Mus. (Piano Performance & Literature), University of Western Ontario, 1997
B.Mus. cum laude, Mount Allison University, 1995
Grants, awards & honours
(selected)
UBC Research Excellence Clusters Initiative, seed funding to establish the UBC Rhythm Research Cluster (with Ève Poudrier and Nathan Hesselink)
SSHRC Standard Research Grant: “Rhythm and Performance in Tonal Music”
U of Alberta Fund for the Support of International Development Activities, funding for two short courses in music theory at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa
Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship