About Me
Caleb Mutch is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. His work focuses on the overlooked histories of fundamental musical concepts such as the cadence, the triad, and form. This research area is complemented by secondary interests in global pop music analysis and in the Digital Humanities.
- History of Music Theory
- Digital Humanities
- Musical Form
- Analysis of Global Pop Music
- Media Studies
PhD Music Theory
Columbia University
Certificate Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Columbia University
MPhil Music Theory
Columbia University
MA Music Theory
Columbia University
BMus Music Scholarship
University of British Columbia
I’m a music theorist working at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.
I study the history of musical thought, focusing on the overlooked histories of musical concepts like the cadence, the triad, and form. My work in textual criticism relies heavily on Digital Humanities approaches to analyze and represent manuscripts, and I am the Digital Director of Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory (under contract with the University of Chicago’s Online Publication Service).
Music analysis is another important area of my research. I draw upon a range of analytic methodologies to study popular music from South Africa and the U.S., and I have also published form-functional and structural analyses of European art music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
→Winner of the David Kraehenbuehl Prize 2022–23.
