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Gordon Sly is a Professor of Music Theory at the College of Music at Michigan State University. He specializes in the music of Benjamin Britten and employs an analytical approach based on Heinrich Schenker. Sly's dissertation, completed at the Eastman School of Music in 1995, focused on group sonata-form movements by Schubert, particularly on how 'off-tonic' recapitulations contravene normative expectations of the form's voice-leading structure. His research has led to a series of articles and an entry on 'sonata form' in Oxford Bibliographies, culminating in the edited volume 'Keys to Drama: Nine Perspectives on Sonata Forms,' published by Ashgate in 2009, which includes essays on anomalies in sonata forms. Notable publications include his chapter in 'Essays on Benjamin Britten Centenary Symposium' and the 2020 volume 'Holy Sonnets of John Donne: 20th-21st Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways to Performance,' co-edited with Michael Callahan. His most recent book, 'Britten’s Donne, Hardy, Blake Songs: Cyclic Design and Meaning', is an analytical study of select works by Britten. Sly has been a member of the MSU faculty since 1999, served as Theory Area chair from 2001-2012, and teaches courses in music theory, Schenker’s approach, and music theory pedagogy.
Department of Psychology