Colonial Galant  

My current book project, Colonial Galant, concerns music made in the Jesuit missions of eighteenth-century Chiquitania (Bolivia).  Archival sources related to Jesuit missions in this part of the world preserve several operas and large-scale liturgical compositions written entirely in the Chiquitano language and attributed to Indigenous composers.  Unlike the heavy counterpoint of other New World sacred music, this repertoire is characterized by transparent textures, simple harmonies, and regular rhythms.  It is a pendant to the European galant style.  My book will be the first English language monograph on this remarkable development in music history.  In it, I reinterpret the musicological narrative of the galant style, situating it for the first time in a global frame.  My essay on this topic, “Colonial Galant: Three Analytical Perspectives from the Chiquitano Missions,” appeared in our discipline’s flagship publication, The Journal of the American Musicological Society.  In November of 2024, this article won the Society for Music Theory’s prestigious Outstanding Publication Award, which is given annually for an exemplary publication authored by a senior scholar.

Peculiar Attunements  

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall.

Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music’s physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.

Beating Time 

Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the shifting relationships between ideas about time in music and science from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Centered on theories of musical meter, the book investigates the interdependence between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. These formulations have evolved throughout the history of Western music, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, author Roger Mathew Grant illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time, informed by one another, have manifested themselves in the field of music.

During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This gradual but conclusive change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Investigating the impacts of this change, Grant explores the timekeeping techniques - musical and otherwise - that implemented this conceptual shift, both technologically and materially.

Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broader intellectual history of temporality, Grant's study fills an unexpected yet conspicuous gap in the history of music theory, and is essential reading for music theorists and composers as well as historical musicologists and practitioners of historically informed performance.

I am a theorist and historian of music and culture with particular interests in affect theory, the history of music theory, and eighteenth-century music.  My journal articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Music Theory Spectrum, Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Journal of Music Theory.  My first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, won the 2016 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory.  In addition to teaching at Wesleyan, I have also been Visiting Professor in the music departments at both Harvard and Yale. My most recent book, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical, was published with Fordham University Press (2020).  I am currently serving as the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University. You can find my CV here.