About Me

A recent C.V. can be found here.

I am a music theorist, historian, and media scholar with broad research and teaching interests including tonal analysis, the history of music theory, pop music, and music in media contemporary media (film, video games, and social media). I grew up in Ohio and have earned degrees from Miami University (B.Mus.), the University of Wisconsin (M.A.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.). I am currently an Associate Professor of Music Theory at Gettysburg College, where I teach courses on music theory, aural skills, sound studies, and film & video game music. I also chair the college’s Data Science minor, and serve as Special Assistant to the Provost’s office. In November 2023, I began a three-year term as Associate Editor of Music Theory Online. While ABD, I taught for a year at Tufts University, and I spent most of graduate school as a Learning Lab Fellow at Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.

My current research projects are concerned with recomposition in the history of music theory (for which I’m currently investigating theories of tonal phrase rhythm and recompositions of post-tonal music); chromatic harmony in the music of Amy Beach; and popular music in video games and on YouTube. Some of my recent writings appear in Music Theory Online, Music Analysis, Music Theory & Analysis, The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, The Journal of Sound and Music in Games, The Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory. My 2018 article about online music analysis won the 2020 Adam Krims Award from the SMT’s Popular Music Interest Group. I also have articles/chapters forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Sound in Video Games, Engaging Students, and SMT-V.  Some recent essays and presentations include: 

• the formal implications of Amy Beach’s self-borrowings (Society for Music Analysis, 2023)

• solo covers on YouTube; (Music Theory Online, 2022)

• Hans Keller’s method of “functional analysis” (Music Analysis, 2020; follow-up in Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, 2024)

• Amy Beach’s incorporation of birdsong transcriptions into her music (AMS 2021; forthcoming in SMT-V)

• Chromatic harmony in the music of Amy Beach and others (SMT 2021)

• the process of sound and music development at Atari in the 1980s (NACVGM 2020, forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Music & Sound in Video Games)

• the phenomenon of music theory “explainers” on popular news websites (Analitica, 2018)

Along with my scholarship and teaching, I have served as an editorial assistant for the Journal of the American Musicological Society; a member of SMT’s IT/Networking Committee; co-chair of SMT’s Film & Multimedia Interest Group; a member of the editorial boards of the journals Intégral and GAMUT and the podcast SMT-Pod; and the web editor for SMT’s scholarly video journal, SMT-V.

You can reach me by email at williamevanohara [at] gmail.com, or find me on Twitter at @oharatheorem.