André de Oliveira Redwood

Assistant Professor André de Oliveira Redwood is a music theorist and historian of music theory. He specializes in the intellectual, cultural, and social history of music theory, with emphases on the relationship between music and rhetoric and on music theory in the Scientific Revolution. These interests converge in his book (in progress), provisionally entitled Music, Science, and Erudition in the Age of Eloquence: Mersenne and the Uses of Rhetoric, which examines the rhetorical dimensions of the music-theoretical writings of French polymath Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). Previously published work includes “Mersenne and the Art of Delivery” (Journal of Music Theory 59/1, 2015), and “Collage, Creativity, and Copyright: Sublime Frequencies and the Ethics of Intellectual Property,” (Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies, ed. Michael Veal and E. Tammy Kim, Wesleyan University Press, 2016).

He has presented his work at various national and international conferences, symposia, and panel discussions including national meetings of the Society for Music Theory; Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (International Conference, Stony Brook University); the Department of Film at the Federal University of Santa Catarina; and at the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice at the University of Cambridge. In fall 2018, he will present at the University of Poitiers for a colloquium marking the 400th anniversary of René Descartes’s Compendium Musicae.

Before joining the faculty at UAlbany in 2018, he was a Fulbright Research Scholar in French Studies at the Institut de Recherche en Musicologie (IReMus), Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV). He has previously taught music theory at the University of Notre Dame and UMass Amherst. In 2011, he was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, part of the Andrew W. Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Early Career Fellowship Program. Here at UAlbany, his teaching responsibilities center primarily on the two-year music theory sequence for the department’s students.