Patrick McCreless

Patrick McCreless (Ph.D., Eastman School of Music, of the University of Rochester) came to Yale in 1998, having taught for five years at the Eastman School of Music and fifteen years at the University of Texas at Austin (also one year on a visiting appointment at the University of Chicago, 1989–90). Much of his work has focused on Wagner and the music of the late nineteenth century. His dissertation/book Wagner’s “Siegfried”: Its Drama, History, and Music, remains one of the two monographs on an individual opera of the Ring cycle. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on Wagner and his music, and he collaborated with the literary scholar Adrian Daub (Stanford University) in writing all the entries on the Ring in the Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (2013).

Professor McCreless has had a long-standing interest in music that has an established presence in the concert repertory, but is understudied in musical scholarship in general, and in music theory and analysis in particular. This interest has motivated his extensive work on the music of Shostakovich, as well as more limited work on Elgar and Nielsen. His engagement with Russian music extends back into that of the late nineteenth century, and some of his last classes and seminars at Yale were on Russian opera and Russian music from Glinka to Shostakovich.

Stepping back from actual musical repertories, he has frequently written about the intellectual history of music theory and its practice, function, and health in the contemporary musical world. Examples include his chapter on rhetoric and music in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory and the essays “Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory,” “Ownership, in Music and Music Theory” (the keynote talk for the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory in 2010), and “Formalism, Fair and Foul.” His concern with music theory as a discipline has not been limited to scholarship: he has served the Society for Music Theory in a number of positions, one of which was president of the Society from 1993 to 1995.

In recent years he has given numerous invited papers and seminars, as well as keynote talks, internationally—in the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Estonia, Denmark, Brazil, and China. And, as a practical musician, he is a choral director and organist, serving as director of music at the First Presbyterian Church of New Haven since 1999.