Kristin WendlandTeaching Professor of Music TheoryInterim Director of Undergraduate Studies

• PhDCity University of New York1991

Kristin Wendland is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Music, where she teaches all levels of undergraduate music theory; gives courses in Argentine tango music; and arranges, coaches, and mentors the students of the Emory Tango Ensemble.

Wendland’s professional activities include work with the College Music Society www.music.org, where she has served as a Board Member for Music Theory and on national and international program committees, and she currently chairs the Committee on Professional Development. Her research interests include the music and dance of the Argentine tango and music theory pedagogy.

She has read papers, participated in panel sessions, and led demonstration workshops on these topics for the College Music Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the Society for Ethnomusicology (see papers and publications link). She has organized, co-directed, narrated and performed on Argentine tango programs at Emory University’s Emerson Concert Hall, the Georgia State University Rialto Theater, the Latin American Association, and numerous milongas in the Atlanta area.

Wendland has been traveling to Buenos Aires annually since 2000 to explore and study the world of tango. She received a Fulbright Lecture and Research grant in 2005, where she taught a seminar in Schenkerian Analysis at the Universidad Católica Argentina in Buenos Aires and pursued her research in Argentine tango music for seven months.

Wendland planned and organized the professional development institute, “Argentine Tango in Theory and Practice,” through the College Music Society in conjunction with the Academia Nacionál del Tango in Buenos Aires in July 2007, and she directed and taught the history and analysis classes for the second CMS institute in Buenos Aires in July 2009.

Most recently she directed the intensive three-week Emory Tango Music and Dance Summer Study Abroad Program in July 2011, and a tango workshop at Emory in June 2014. Her book Tracing Tangueoros: Argentine Tango Instrumental Music appeared in March 2016 with Oxford University Press.

Her music degrees include the B.M. in Theory from Florida State University, M.M. in Composition from the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati, and the Ph.D. in Composition from the City University of New York.

Scholarship and Performances

• The Power of Practice: How Music and Yoga Transformed the Life and Work of Yehudi Menuhin. January 1 2024, SUNY Press Enhanced open-access digital version on Manifold

• The Cambridge Companion to Tango. April 2024, coedited with Kacey Link Cambridge University Presscompanion website by Emory Center for Digital Scholarship

• "Tango, a Primer: a guide to the genre's distinctive performance practices." in the Summer 2018 edition of Chamber Music Magazine Download the article

• "Faces of Tango" on the Naxos Musicology Site https://www.naxosmusicology.com/essays/faces-of-tango/ Download the article

• Invited program notes for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra tango concerts, November 18-21, 2021 in the November Symphony program (pp. 28-31) and audio version on soundcloud; and special chamber series booklet (pp. 28-29).

So You Think You Know Tango?