About

Derek R. Strykowski holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Brandeis University, where he was a Mildred and Herbert Lee fellow, and is presently a clinical assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.

As a scholar of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Strykowski investigates the history of composition from a range of social-scientific perspectives in order to advance our theoretical knowledge of the relationship between compositional circumstance and the development of musical style. For example, his recent article in the Journal of Musicological Research (2016) illuminates not only the artistic origins of Alban Berg’s late operatic style but also the behavioral principles that its development represents. Currently in preparation are a pair of research articles, one of which is forthcoming from Notes (2018), that explore how the business of music publishing influenced the development of nineteenth-century style.

He also maintains a second program of research involving the formal empirical analysis of sixteenth-century polyphony. Having performed a quantitative corpus study of the four- and five-voice madrigals of the Italian composer Luca Marenzio, Strykowski recently published “Text Painting, or Coincidence? Treatment of Height-Related Imagery in the Madrigals of Luca Marenzio” in the Empirical Musicology Review (2017). This same methodological approach—sometimes associated with the digital humanities—has also begun to inform his primary line of research as a means to gauge the long-term historical development of a musical style.