EMM 64: Your Brain On What? | Professor Megan Long

Today we get to have a fantastic conversation with Professor Megan Long of Oberlin College & Conservatory.

Megan Kaes Long studies European song traditions of the 16th and 17th centuries and the theoretical discourses that describe them. Her book, Hearing Homophony: Tonal Expectation at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020 and won the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award in 2021.

Long’s articles have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, and Open Access Musicology and her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her 2018 article, “Cadential Syntax and Tonal Expectation in Late Sixteenth-Century Homophony” won the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award.

Long is the editor of SMT-V, the Society for Music Theory’s peer-reviewed video-journal. Long is also a mezzo-soprano who specializes in music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Long's work was honored with Oberlin College & Conservatory's Excellence in Teaching Award for the 2021-22 academic year.

Check out the articles mentioned in the show by following the links below:

Your Brain On Hexichordal Solmization

Hexachordal Solmization and Syllable-Invariant Counterpoint in the Vocal Music of William Byrd

Rebecca Cypess's article on "thin notation": https://www.earlymusicamerica.org/web-articles/translation-and-the-ideas-of-early-music/ 

Recording of William Byrd's Come Woeful Orpheus by The Sixteen found on YouTube.