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 forthcoming book, Universal Harmony 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). In connection with this research, he has published articles in Music Theory Spectrum (2023) and the Journal of Music Theory (2015), as well as chapters in Penser, composer, pratiquer la musique à l’époque du Compendium musicae (1618) de René Descartes (Paris: Champion, 2024), in Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), and a chapter in-progress to appear in New Perspectives on Mersenne in the History of Knowledge, Music, and Religion (Leiden: Brill). He is also interested in music and the law, which led him to varied activities including authoring the glossary of musical terms for the Music Copyright Infringement Resource, contributions to amicus curiae briefs, conference presentations, and a chapter in Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016). 

He has presented his work internationally and nationally at a variety of conferences, symposia, and panel discussions. Most recently, he was invited to speak at New Perspectives on Mersenne in the History of Knowledge, Music, and Religion at Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for the History of Art, in Rome, Italy. Other presentations have included international colloquium Penser, composer, pratiquer la musique à l’époque du Compendium musicae (1618) de René Descartes, co-sponsored by the University of Poitiers, Paris-Sorbonne University, and the Institut de recherche en musicologie (IReMus) in Poitiers, France; invited lecture at Arthur F. Kinney Renaissance Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and national meetings of the Society for Music Theory and the American Musicological Society. 

Before joining the faculty at UAlbany in 2018, he was a Fulbright Research Scholar in French Studies working at IReMus Paris-Sorbonne University (formerly 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. He holds a BM in music theory from the Eastman School of Music, and PhD from Yale University. 

Here at UAlbany, he directs the core music theory sequence and electives for music majors, as well as a general education course on music, creativity, and the law. In addition, he has supervised numerous independent studies on music theory pedagogy, keyboard skills, chromatic harmony, and forensic musicology.