Dora Hanninen

Years of service:1998–2025

Dora A. Hanninen is a music theorist whose work engages broad questions in the theory and philosophy of music analysis, such as the complex, interactive nature of musical sound; musical segmentation; repetition, association, and categorization in music analysis; interrelations between words and visual images; musical movement; and various aspects of music practice. Many of her analytic writings focus on twentieth-century and contemporary works by Babbitt, Cage, Feldman, Messiaen, Morris, Nancarrow, Riley, Swift, Webern, and Wolpe; but others concern works by Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, and Rachmaninoff; and the analytic reach of her theoretic work extends far beyond, as evidenced by her application to a music–text by Boretz and other scholars’ applications to Broadway musicals, non-Western musics, and other repertoires.

Professor Hanninen taught at the University of Maryland from 1998–2025; she served as Division Coordinator for Music Theory and Composition from 2005–2024. Undergraduate offerings included the four-semester core and seminars cross-listed at the graduate level. Graduate seminars she created included Critical Concepts in Music Theory, Music Practice, Musical Movement and Music Analysis, Theory in Analysis, Theory and Analysis of Atonal and Twelve-tone Music, Analysis of Twentieth-Century Works by American Composers, Performance and Analysis (co-taught with Professor of Violin James Stern), and Theories of Rhythm, Meter, and Temporality. In 2020, she received a Teaching Innovation Grant from the University of Maryland to retool and redesign a course for the online environment and collaborate with faculty colleagues to ensure continuity and quality of instruction in the core theory curriculum during the COVID pandemic.

In 2010 Dr. Hanninen received the Society for Music Theory’s Outstanding Publication Award for “Associative Sets, Categories, and Music Analysis” (Journal of Music Theory 48/2, 2004). Her book, A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization, was published by the University of Rochester Press in December 2012 and has received reviews in the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, Die Musikforschung, and Notes. Other writings include "Orientations, Criteria, Segments: A General Theory of Segmentation for Music Analysis" (Journal of Music Theory 45/2, 2001); "A Theory of Recontextualization in Music: Analyzing Phenomenal Transformations of Repetition (Music Theory Spectrum 25/1, 2003), "Association and the Emergence of Form in Two Works by Stefan Wolpe" (The Open Space Magazine 6, 2004), "Feldman, Analysis, Experience" (Twentieth-Century Music 1/2, 2004), " 'What is about, is also of, also is': Words, Musical Organization, and Boretz's Language ,as a music Part I, 'Thesis'" (Perspectives of New Music 44/2, 2006); "Species Concepts in Biology and Perspectives on Association in Music Analysis" (Perspectives of New Music 47/1, 2009); “What Words Cannot Express (Music Does)” (Music Theory Spectrum 34/1, 2012); “Regarding Music and Apperception: Locating ‘Sound’ in Tonal and Post-tonal Contexts” (in Organized Sound, edited by Christian Utz, 2013); “Asking Questions / Making Music: Listening, Analysis, and Cage” (Music Theory Online 20/2/4, June 2014); “Nature and Music in Robert Morris’s Indoor Music: On strange flowers, occasional storms” (Perspectives of New Music 52/2, 2014); and “Images, Visualization, and Representation” (in Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, edited by Steven Rings and Alexander Rehding, published online in 2018, print in 2019). Her recent work focuses on musical movement and music practice, as in “Musical Feels” (Society for Music Theory 43rd Annual Meeting, virtual, 2020), “At the Keyboard: On Typing, Hanon, Independence, and Integration” (Dance & Movement Interest Group meeting, Society for Music Theory 46th Annual Meeting, Denver, 2023), and “Listening & Listening-while: Soundscrolls / Music Theory, Phenomenology / and Qualities of Musical Presence in Practice” (Music Theory Spectrum 49/2, November 2027, in press). Her book in progress is titled Music Practice: Making Music from the Inside Out.

Dr. Hanninen has presented invited talks at universities around the United States, as well as at national, international, and regional meetings of the Society for Music Theory, Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music, Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, Music Theory Society of New York State, New England Conference of Music Theorists, Music Theory Midwest, Stefan Wolpe Society, Music & Nature Symposium, and New Music Festival at Bowling Green State University. She has served on program committees for the Society for Music Theory and the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic (the latter also as Program Chair); on the editorial boards of Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, Theory and Practice, and Intégral; and as co-editor of a special issue of Perspectives of New Music. She served as Vice President of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic from 2013–2015, as a Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the Society for Music Theory from 2007–2010, and as President of the Society for Music Theory from 2015–2017.