Boyd Pomeroy

Boyd Pomeroy holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and Cornell University, where he earned his Ph. D. (2000) for his dissertation Toward a New Tonal Practice: Chromaticism and Form in Debussy’s Orchestral Music (2000). Before his second career in music theory, he had a first career in the 1980s and early ’90s as a professional double bass player in symphony orchestras in Israel, the UK, and the USA.

As a music theorist, he has served on the faculties of the Schools of Music at Georgia State University (2001–2008) and the University of Arizona (2008–present). He works on Schenkerian analysis, formal studies of music of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the music of Debussy. He has presented his research at numerous national meetings of the Society for Music Theory, as well as the International Conference on Music Analysis (Dublin, 2005), conferences on Schenkerian analysis (New York, 2006), and the music of Brahms (New York, 2012) and Debussy (Montréal, where he was a special invited speaker in 2012). His research has been published in the journals Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music Review, and Min Ad (Israel Studies in Musicology), as well as invited book chapters in the collections The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, Essays from the Fourth International Schenker Symposium, Johannes Brahms und Anton Bruckner im Spiegel der Musiktheorie, Debussy’s Resonance, Bach to Brahms, and Explorations in Schenkerian Analysis. He recently contributed the article “Schenkerian Analysis” for the Oxford Bibliographies Online project.

In recent years he has been an invited guest for special lectures and summer courses in Israel (Hebrew University, Bar Ilan University) and Costa Rica (University of Costa Rica, San José).