Stephen A. CristChair, Department of MusicProfessor of Music History

• PhDBrandeis University1988
• MMusUniversity of South Florida1980
• BAHarvard University1978

Stephen A. Crist works largely in European music of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with additional interests in jazz and hymnody. 

He is the author of Dave Brubeck’s Time Out (Oxford University Press, 2019). Other recent publications include a chapter about the impact of J. S. Bach’s music on the Modern Jazz Quartet in Bach Reworked (University of Illinois Press, 2020), and the article “Johann Philipp Bach and the Aria Scotese con Variazzione: Twilight of the Bach Dynasty?” in BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (2020). His edition of J. P. Bach’s newly discovered variations for cello and harpsichord appeared in 2021. His new edition of the complete vocal music of Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713-1780) will be published in the near future (A-R Editions). He is also serving as co-editor (with Daniel R. Melamed) of The Cambridge Companion to the Bach Cantatas (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 

He was a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and a visiting scholar at the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, with support from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). 

Crist received his Ph.D. (music history) from Brandeis University, after an M.M. (music theory) from the University of South Florida, and a B.A. (English and American literature and language) from Harvard University.