|
| |
 Alfred
Cramer
Associate Professor of Music
Thatcher 105, (909) 621-8155,
alfred.cramer@pomona.edu
Expertise Profile
Alfred Cramer is a music scholar whose work draws on
fields as diverse as history, psychology, and
linguistics as well as on his own considerable
experience as a musical performer. At Pomona, Cramer
teaches courses on sound in culture (Music 91: Sites
of Sound: Music, Technology, Aural Culture, Film)
and in the mind (Music 149: Music Perception and
Cognition). For music majors, he teaches music
theory courses (Music 80-82: Theory I, II, and III) and
a course that offers a coherent perspective on the
various branches of musical study (Music 86: Music in
Theory and Practice). In the past he has taught on
topics such as Emotion in Music, History of Reading,
and The Idea of American Music 1925-1950.
As a researcher, Professor Cramer is interested in the
interface between cognition and culture, and in how
music and language may (or may not) be related. He is at
work on a book about music composed in the years before
World War I by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and
Alban Berg. The book draws on early twentieth-century
psychological ideas to explain how these highly
influential modernist composers-often regarded as
mathematical and unemotional-worked to make their music
as directly expressive as possible. Cramer is also in
the early stages of a study examining how the ups and
downs that structure spoken language also structure a
wide variety of music. An earlier study investigated
nineteenth-century music in relation to
nineteenth-century handwriting, stenography, and
information theory.
All of these scholarly studies attend closely to the
problems of musical performance. Professor Cramer is an
accomplished violinist with particular enthusiasm for
orchestral playing and historically informed
performance. While still in high school he was a member
of the Colorado Springs Symphony Orchestra. He has also
played in the New Haven Symphony, the National Repertory
Orchestra, and in several regional orchestras in the
Philadelphia area, and as soloist with the National
Repertory Orchestra. As a period-instrument violinist he
has performed with the University of Pennsylvania
Baroque Ensemble, Brandywine Baroque, and the Bach
Festival of Philadelphia, among others.
A member of the Pomona faculty since 1995, he received
his B.A. in music from Yale University in 1987 and his
Ph.D. in music theory from the University of
Pennsylvania in 1997. He received the Society for
Music Theory's
Outstanding Publication Award
in 2004. |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Quick Links |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Explore Pomona's Web |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Find It |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Search |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
