Nathan CobbVisiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory

• PhD in Music TheoryUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
• MA in Music TheoryUniversity of Washington
• BA in MusicHouston Baptist University

Nathan Cobb is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Emory University. Nathan completed his Ph.D. in Music Theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a dissertation on the early compositional practice of Kaija Saariaho, from 1976–1986. His research draws on archival materials housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation and focuses specifically on Saariaho’s serial training and engagements with analog and digital composition technologies.

Nathan has published and forthcoming articles in Music Theory Online, the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Perspectives of New Music, and an edited volume on the music of Morton Feldman, as well as several additional projects that are actively in development or under review. He has presented research at music and interdisciplinary conferences on a wide variety of topics, including science and technology studies, popular music, ecological and philosophical approaches to music analysis, post-tonal theory pedagogy, and topic theory. His research has been generously supported by grants from the Paul Sacher Foundation, the American Musicological Society, and the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, as well as numerous university fellowships.

In addition to this music-based research, Nathan also engages with contemporary philosophy, art, and cinema as part of his broader interest in the intellectual development of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is reflected in forthcoming research in Criticism, as well as a project on the collaborative relationship of film director Agnés Varda and composer Joanna Bruzdowicz that is currently in development.

Nathan earned his BA in Music, summa cum laude, from Houston Baptist University in 2016 and an MA in Music Theory from the University of Washington in 2019. His master’s thesis, entitled “Analyzing Perceived Time: A Husserlian Study of Temporal-Consciousness in Gérard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum and Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories,” explores the effects of transformational processes on listeners’ experiences of temporal pacing.