Simon Music Center, SM325K
Education
- Ph.D., Music Theory, McGill University, 2021
- MMus., King’s College, London, 2015
- M.A. (Oxon), University of Oxford, 2013
James Donaldson is assistant professor of music in music theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He received his Ph.D. in Music Theory from McGill University in 2021. Prior to his appointment at Indiana University, he served as lecturer in music at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.
Donaldson’s primary area of research concerns musical meaning in postwar concert music, with a particular focus on topic theory. This work has appeared in journals such as Music Theory Spectrum, The Journal of Musicology, and Music Analysis. He is currently preparing a monograph that expands this work through engaging with genre theory to formulate new topic-theoretical approaches to music from the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
His additional interests include surrealism, spectralism, and issues of form in contemporary tonal composition. Articles on these topics have appeared in Twentieth-Century Music and Music Theory Online. He regularly presents papers at conferences in Europe and North America, and his research has been featured on BBC Radio.
Selected Publications
“Sketching Musical Meaning? Case Studies from Ligeti’s Late Works” Journal of Musicology 41/3 (2024)
“Kaleidoscopic Topics in the Music of György Ligeti and Thomas Adès” Music Theory Online 30/2 (2024)
“Second-Order Topics and Prokofiev’s String Quartets” Music Analysis 42/2, 227–261 (2023)
“Sketching between the Chorale and Sound Mass in Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 35, 38–43 (2023)
“Living Toys in Thomas Adès’s Living Toys: Transforming the Post-Tonal Topic” Music Theory Spectrum 44/1, 155–172 (2022)
“Topics, Double Coding, and Form Functionality in Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet” Tempo 75/298, 41–51 (2021)
“Melody on the Threshold in Spectral Music” Music Theory Online 27/2 (2021)
“Reading the Musical Surreal through Poulenc’s Fifth Relations” Twentieth-Century Music 17/2, 127–160 (2020)