Steven Vande Moortele

Biography

Steven Vande Moortele is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Toronto, where he is also director of the Centre for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Music (CSNCM). His research interests include theories of musical form, the analysis of large-scale instrumental music from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and the works of Richard Wagner and Arnold Schoenberg. He has published articles and reviews in Music Analysis, Res Musica, Intégral, Current Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Musik und Ästhetik, Dutch Journal of Music Theory, and Revue belge de musicologie, as well as essays in several edited volumes. His first book, Two-Dimensional Sonata Form: Form and Cycle in Single-Movement Instrumental Works by Liszt, Strauss, Schoenberg, and Zemlinsky, appeared in 2009, and an edited volume titled Formal Functions in Perspective: Essays on Musical Form from Haydn to Adorno (coedited with Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers and Nathan Martin) appeared with the University of Rochester Press in 2015. His second monograph, The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 and received the 2018 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory.

Recent and forthcoming publications deal with such diverse topics as form in the first movement of Schubert’s C major String Quintet, the analysis and hermeneutics of Romantic overtures, Adorno’s “material theory of form,” and the “Song of the Wood Dove” from Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder. Current projects include contributions to the volume Rethinking Mendelssohn (Oxford University Press, edited by Benedict Taylor and Angela Mace) and to the Handbuch Musikanalyse: Methode und Pluralität (Bärenreiter–Meztler, edited by Ariane Jeßulat, Oliver Schwab-Felisch, Jan Philipp Sprick, and Christian Thorau) as well as an essay on the overture to Wagner’s first opera, Die Feen. Before coming to the University of Toronto, Vande Moortele held postdoctoral positions at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and McGill University and taught at the University of Oklahoma. His research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Connaught Fund of the University of Toronto, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Bonn, Germany), and the Research Fund Flanders (FWO Vlaanderen). In 2013 he was awarded the Mart. J. Lürsen Prize of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory (Vereniging voor Muziektheorie). Since 2015, Vande Moortele has been an affiliate faculty member of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. From 2014 until 2016, he also was a co-editor of the journal Music Theory & Analysis (MTA).