Faculty – Penn State Musicology and Music Theory Program

Vincent Benitez, Professor of Music Theory

Vincent Benitez is Professor of Music Theory and an internationally recognized expert on the music of Olivier Messiaen. He holds a PhD in music theory from Indiana University and a DMA in organ from Arizona State University. Benitez has authored three books on Messiaen, most recently Olivier Messiaen’s Opera, Saint François d’Assise (IU Press, 2019), and articles on his music in music theory and musicology journals. His research at the BnF, Paris, resulted in an annotated catalogue of Messiaen’s birdsong notebooks, published in Olivier Messiaen: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge, 2018). Benitez is writing a fourth book, which will center on musical time in Messiaen’s late works.

Benitez has also published on Baroque music theory, focusing on the music of Bach and Buxtehude. He has also published on the music of the Beatles and Paul McCartney (Praeger, 2010) and written two online general education courses at Penn State devoted to the music and cultural impact of the Fab Four.

Maureen Carr, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Music Theory

Maureen A. Carr is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Music and recipient of the Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts and Humanities.

A scholar of the music of Igor Stravinsky, Carr has studied his manuscripts and other documents extensively at the Stravinsky Archive of the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, as well as archival collections at the Library of Congress and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York City, and various archives in Paris and London.

Mark Ferraguto, Associate Professor of Musicology

Mark Ferraguto specializes in the music, culture, and politics of 18th- and early 19th-century Europe. He is the author of Beethoven 1806 (Oxford University Press, 2019), a musical microhistory that has been described as “one of the boldest contextual studies [of Beethoven] to date” (Oxford Bibliographies Online). Other publications include the first modern edition of Franz Weiss’s “Razumovsky” Quartets (A-R Editions, 2023) and the interdisciplinary essay collection Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (co-edited with Rebekah Ahrendt and Damien Mahiet; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). A performer on organ and harpsichord, he studied music history and early keyboards at Cornell University, the College of the Holy Cross, and the Conservatoire de Strasbourg.

Taylor Greer, Associate Professor of Music Theory

Taylor A. Greer is an associate professor in music theory and analysis. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, he earned a BA in music and philosophy as well as a PhD in music theory, all from Yale University. His teaching interests include harmony, counterpoint, turn-of-the-century French art song, early modernism, music semiotics, exoticism, American folk music, and Schenkerian theory.

His recent research culminated in a book entitled The Pastoral in Charles Griffes’s Music: Aesthetic of Ambivalence, published by Indiana University Press in May 2024. Charles Griffes was a visionary American composer at the turn of the twentieth century whose music synthesized many sources of inspiration including French sensuality, British Aestheticism, and non-Western folk music as well as a wide range of poets including Oscar Wilde, William Sharp, and Walt Whitman. His book argues that Griffes revived and reinvented the eighteenth-century pastoral tradition, and that a new interpretive framework, called the ambivalent pastoral, is needed to calibrate his stylistic eclecticism.

Stephen Hopkins, Coordinator of Online Education

Music theorist, composer, and performer Stephen Hopkins is a member of the graduate faculty in music theory. Prior to his arrival at Penn State in 2003, Hopkins served for six years as music director at North Florida Community College. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees in music theory from Florida State University, where he was awarded a University Fellowship for his graduate studies. His undergraduate degree is from the College of William and Mary.

Hopkins is a founding member of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic. His research interests include the music of Scriabin and Messiaen, as well as jazz and film music. In the School of Music, Hopkins serves as coordinator of online general education, and has authored four online music courses. With his extensive experience in online education, Hopkins has contributed several articles on the subject, and has been an invited presenter at conferences of the Association for Technology in Music Instruction (ATMI) and the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM).

Eric McKee, Professor of Music Theory

Eric McKee teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Music Theory. He holds a BM and MM in violin performance from West Virginia University and an MA and PhD in music theory from the University of Michigan.

His research interests include dance/music relations in dances of the 18th and 19th centuries, topic theory, and film music.

His books include Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time (2011) and Sight Singing Complete (co-author, 2015). His articles have appeared in Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, Theory and Practice, and College Music Symposium and as book chapters in Chopin and His World (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (2014), and The Age of Chopin (2004).

Marica Tacconi, Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Art History; Associate Director of Faculty Development and Research/Creative Activity

Marica S. Tacconi joined the Penn State faculty in 1998 and teaches undergraduate and graduate music history. A native of central Italy, she is a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy and holds a BA from Williams College and a PhD in musicology from Yale University.

Tacconi’s interdisciplinary research interests focus on the music, art, and culture of late medieval and early modern Italy. Her scholarly work has been presented at conferences nationally and internationally, and has appeared in numerous journals, collections of essays, and exhibition catalogues. She is the author of I Libri del Duomo di Firenze (with Lorenzo Fabbri; Centro Di, 1997) and of Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Her current scholarship focuses on the music of Baroque Venice, where she is unearthing musical gems that have been neglected and unheard for centuries. She has collaborated with internationally acclaimed ensembles, including the Venice Music Project Ensemble and the Grammy Award-winning Apollo’s Fire-The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra.

Charles Youmans, Professor of Musicology

Charles Youmans teaches undergraduate and graduate music history. Before joining the School of Music faculty in 1999, he taught for three years at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

Youmans’s research deals with musical aesthetics in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria. His books include Mahler in Context (ed., Cambridge, 2020), Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue (Indiana, 2016), The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss (ed., 2010), and Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Indiana, 2005). The author of all nine chapters on Strauss’s tone poems in the Richard Strauss Handbuch (Metzler/Bärenreiter, 2014), he has published articles in 19th-Century Music, The Musical Quarterly, the Journal of Musicology, and elsewhere.