James Currie

James Currie is an Associate Professor of Music in Historical Musicology at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Currie is a writer and performer whose work deals with articulating the points of interaction and shifts between music, history, philosophy and politics. His scholarly writings have appeared many times, including in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Musical Quarterly, Popular Music, Music and Letters, Women and Music, and in a number of collections. His book Music and the Politics of Negation was published in 2012 by Indiana University Press and is at the same time an expanded political and philosophical critique of the ubiquitous postmodern ideologies of the contemporary academy and an examination of the enduring relevance of the founding principles of modernity and their articulation in the music of the Viennese classical period . After studying at Cambridge University (UK) and Columbia University in New York City, where he wrote a dissertation on fugal counterpoint and enlightenment thinking in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, he held a postdoctoral research position at the Society of Fellowship of the humanities from Columbia University and taught at the College of Music at Loyola University in New Orleans before joining the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo in 2003, where he is now an Associate Professor. He focused on teaching music history to undergraduate students and music and philosophy at the graduate level, and was involved in a number of creative projects with the graduate students, including writing, directing, and staging the play Example of Excess, which took place at Hallwalls in December 2006 Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo and wrote the libretto for Diana Soh's opera Down the Lane, which p was performed in August 2011 as part of the Tete-a-Tete Contemporary Opera Festival in London. He is currently working on the completion of a volume of poetry entitled “The Mourning After” and has started work on a second academic book project on forgetting and the limits of culturally-based methods of music interpretation and evaluation and their value. The working title is 'A Time to Forget: Music and Context in a Troubled Time'. Faculty Page .