Faculty

Chris Park is a part-time associate teaching professor in the Techniques of Music department at the Mannes School of Music at The New School. Originally trained as a violinist, he later studied Schenkerian analysis with Carl Schachter. He teaches courses ranging from freshman music theory to advanced analysis, as well as seminars on Beethoven, Wagner's Ring, Mahler, and the nineteenth-century tone poem. Drawing on Schenkerian analysis, his research explores the interaction of tonal structure, musical form, and extra-musical meaning in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoire. His current work brings together three longstanding interests: musical form, tonal structure, and drama. Underlying much of his scholarship is a central question: How does tonal structure create or support musical meaning? His recent work on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony traces the long-range preparation of climactic moments in the Finale, including one of particular social and political significance. He completed his dissertation, Mozart’s Harmonization Exercises for Barbary Ployer, in 1999. Park's opera, Phedra and Hippolytus, based on Euripides' Hippolytus, was fully staged in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2013. He is the reed organist at the New Boston Congregational Church in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and the drummer for Otto's German Band in Berkshire County.