Simon Music Building, M325H
Bryan Espinosa is visiting assistant professor of music in music theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Espinosa’s research focuses on eighteenth-century Iberian music, Galant schema theory, partimento practice, and more broadly, the application of modern and historically informed theories to non-canonical repertoires.
In his dissertation, “Theorizing Sonata Form from the Margins: The Keyboard Sonata in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Espinosa examines a wide corpus of keyboard sonatas by Spanish composers from about 1750 to 1800 to illuminate the formal parameters particular to the Spanish style. He has presented this work at the Society for Music Theory as well as at various regional conferences.
Espinosa is currently working on projects that include an examination of Manuel Blasco de Nebra’s use of sonata form in his Seis sonatas (1780), a study of how common Galant schemata are reinterpreted to cross phrase boundaries within ground-bass cycles, and a reevaluation of how form is taught in undergraduate music theory curricula.