People

Amy Bauer Assistant Professor of Music (Music Theory, Critical Theory) Office: 313 Music & Media Phone: 949-824-3854 abauer@uci.edu Ph.D., Yale University, 1997 Amy Bauer's research focuses on twentieth-century music, especially the music of György Ligeti and issues surrounding the reception and analysis of post-1945 music.

She has published on the music of Ligeti and on issues in the reception and theory of modernist music. In addition she has given papers at national and international conferences on the music of Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams, and cross-cultural issues in twentieth century music. Her monograph, entitled Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (under consideration by Ashgate Press), is the first full-length study that sets analysis of the composer's oeuvre within the context of a wide-ranging discussion of the larger cultural meanings posed by the music and its reception. Works from Kineret (1941) to the Hamburg Concerto (1998-1999/2003) illustrate four critical tropes that embrace both internal musical relations and the composer's links to tradition, the 1960s avant-garde, and the musical pluralism of the present. Its interdisciplinary focus reflects the changing role of art music in cultural discourse, and clarifies the composer’s ambiguous position as both outside and intrinsically part of twentieth-century musical modernism.

Prior to joining the faculty at UC Irvine she taught at Washington University, West Chester University, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Research Interests

György Ligeti, cross-cultural influence in music, interdisciplinary approaches to music analysis, critical theory, psychoanalysis, popular music and jazz theory.

Teaching

Undergraduate music theory and analysis, counterpoint, seminars in post-1945 music, rhythmic theory, Schenkerian analysis, history of theory, cross-cultural influences in music, world music, theory of non-Western music, readings in contemporary music theory.

Selected Publications

Books

Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (in progress)

Articles

"Chaotic Systems in the Music of Ligeti" (under consideration by Music Theory Spectrum)

"The 'Other' of the Exotic: Balinese Music as 'Grammatical Paradigm' in the Music of Ligeti" (under consideration by Music Analysis)

"Tone-color, movement, changing harmonic planes: Cognition, Constraints and Conceptual Blends in Modernist Music," The Pleasure of Modernism: Intention, Meaning, and the Compositional Avant-Garde, Arved Ashby, editor, Rochester: Eastman Studies in Music, 2004.

Review of Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (Faber & Faber 2003), Twentieth-Century Music (forthcoming)

"'Composing the Sound itself;' Secondary Parameters and Structure in the Music of Ligeti," Indiana Theory Review, Volume 22, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 37-64.