Keynote speakers

Valentina Kholopova
Distinguished Professor of Music Theory, Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory; Moscow Lomonosov State University (Russian Federation)

Keynote lecture
The Tradition of Semantic Analysis of Music in Russian Musicology


Joseph Straus
Distinguished Professor of Music Theory, Graduate Center, City University of New York (USA)

Keynote lecture
Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability

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​John Koslovsky
Professor of Music Theory, Conservatory of Amsterdam, Utrecht University (The Netherlands) 
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​Keynote lecture
Playing with Musical Hierarchies

Born in 1935 in Ryazan, Russia. She is the sister of the famous Russian musicologist Yuri Kholopov. 
Kholopova graduated from the Moscow State P.I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory majoring in music theory in 1959. In 1962 she completed her post-graduate studies at the Moscow Conservatory, where her academic advisor was Leo Abramovich Mazel.
Since 1960 she has taught at the Moscow Conservatory, having been awarded the title of professor. In 1991 she founded a new department at the Moscow Conservatory – the Department of Interdisciplinary Specializations for Musicologists – which he has headed since then up to the present time. The title of her dissertation written for the degree of Candidate of Arts, defended in 1968, is “Voprosy ritma v tvorchestve kompozitorov XX veka” [“Questions of Rhythm in the Musical Legacy of 20 th Century Composers”], and the title of her dissertation written for the degree of Doctor of Arts, defended in 1985, is “Russkaya muzykal’naya ritmika” [“Russian Musical Rhythm”]. She has had over 20 books and 600 articles published. She has created three academic trends which are new for Russia: the theory and history of musical rhythm, the theory of musical emotions and the theory of musical content. Her books include monographs about Anton Webern (written together with Yuri Kholopov, translated into German and Italian), Alfred Schnittke (together with Evgenia Chigareva) and Rodion Shchedrin (translated into German). In her teaching at the Moscow Conservatory she has introduced three new subjects: “Music as an Art,” “The Theory of Musical Content” and “The Semantic Specificity of Music,” which are taught by her and her students. Valentina Kholopova’s academic school comprises 70 people.

​Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has written numerous articles and scholarly monographs on a variety of topics in modernist music. He has also written a series of articles and books that engage disability as a cultural practice, most recently Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability (Oxford University Press 2018), which received the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory (SMT). He was President of SMT from 1997–99.

John Koslovsky is on the music theory faculty at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and is an affiliate researcher in the humanities at Utrecht University. His research deals with the history of music theory and analysis, Schenkerian analysis, intertextuality, and musical performativity. He is currently co-editing a book volume (with Michiel Schuijer) entitled Music Performance Encounters: Collaborations and Confrontations (Routledge, forthcoming), and is writing a book dealing with the work of Felix Salzer and its broader impact on post-WWII American music theory. He is a member of the Schenker Documents Online project and former president of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory.