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Laura EmmeryAssociate Professor of Music Theory

Education

  • PhDUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
  • MMNew England Conservatory
  • BMCalifornia State University, Northridge

About

Laura Emmery is Associate Professor of Music Theory. Her research focuses on 20th/21st-century music and post-tonal theory. Laura’s current project examines political, social, and cultural events that led to the momentous avant-garde and experimental music scene in Yugoslavia and the country’s role in the Cold War cultural diplomacy. It follows the emergence of a postwar Yugoslav cultural program that made the republic a magnet for experimental musicians and artists from throughout the Western and Eastern Blocs, through the sudden and violent dissolution of that program with the collapse of the political state.

Laura is currently working on a monograph, Cold War Cultural Diplomacy: Music Festivals in Yugoslavia. She is also the author of Yugoslav Avant-Garde Music, 1945–1991 (forthcoming), Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1: Myths, Narratives, and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy (2024), The Origins of Yugoslav Musical Minimalism (2024), Elliott Carter Speaks: Unpublished Lectures (2022), and Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets: A Study in Sketches (2020). Her articles have been published in Twentieth-Century Music, Contemporary Music Review, The Musical Quarterly, and Music Theory Online, among others.

Laura’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Scholars Fellowship, American Philosophical Society's Franklin Research Grant, the Society for American Music’s Edward T. Cone Fellowship, Paul Sacher Stiftung Research Grant, Albert and Elaine Borchard European Studies Fellowship, and several Emory University grants, including Halle Institute Global Perspectives, Center for Faculty Development and Excellence Public Scholarship Advancement Fund, Program to Enhance Research and Scholarship, University Research Committee–Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning, and the Provost Research Grant, among others.

Laura is also a co-PI for a joint music and health project “Moving in space and time: identifying spatial and temporal components of complex rhythmic movement training for people with prodromal Alzheimer’s disease,” with faculty from the departments of medicine and biomedical engineering. This project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, Emory-Udall Parkinson’s Disease Center Pilot Grants Program, Senior Vice-President of Research at the Intersection Fund, and Innovation Accelerator core of the Cognitive Empowerment Program.

Laura serves as Editor-in-Chief of Music Theory Spectrum (2023–2027) and Editor of Contemporary Music Review (2021–2025). Previously, she served as Associate Editor of Music Theory Spectrum, President of Music Theory Southeast, on the SMT Committee on the Status of Women, and has co-chaired SMT's Post-1945 Music Analysis and Autographs and Archival Documents Interest Groups. Laura has also been appointed as the Architect of Musical Discourse for the Music Biennale Zagreb.

Laura was born in Paris (France) and lived in Belgrade (Serbia, then Yugoslavia) and Vienna (Austria), where she studied piano performance and music theory in music conservatories. She completed her undergraduate and graduate education in the United States, receiving her Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of California in Santa Barbara in 2014. Laura joined the music faculty at Emory University in 2014 first as Visiting Assistant Professor and then as Assistant Professor in 2016.

Publications

Monographs
  • Laura Emmery and Ivana Miladinović Prica, Cold War Cultural Diplomacy: Music Festivals in Yugoslavia (in progress)
  • Laura Emmery, Yugoslav Avant-Garde Music, 1945–1991 (under review; forthcoming)
  • Laura Emmery, Jonathan Harvey’s String Quartets and the String Trio: A Spiritual Journey (under review; forthcoming)
  • Laura Emmery, Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1: Myths, Narratives, and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
  • Laura Emmery and Ivana Miladinović Prica, The Origins of Yugoslav Musical Minimalism (Belgrade: Cultural Center Parobrod, 2024)
  • Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets: A Study in Sketches (Routledge 2020)
    • Society for Music Theory Emerging Scholar Publication Award finalist, 2020
    • Review by Peter Smucker, Music Theory Online 27.4 (2021)
    • Review by Christian Carey, Tempo 76/299 (2022): 102–4
    • Review by John Aylward, Music & Letters 102/2 (2021): 385–87
Critical Editions
  • Laura Emmery, Elliott Carter Speaks: Unpublished Lectures (University of Illinois Press, 2022)
    • Review by Alex Burtzos, Notes 80/1 (2023): 159–62.
    • Review by Geoff Brown, BBC Music Magazine (June 2022): 94.
Edited Volumes
  • Laura Emmery and Sabine Feisst, eds., Kronos Quartet at 50, in Contemporary Music Review 44/1–4 (2026)
  • Laura Emmery, ed., Minimalist Music in Eastern Europe, in Contemporary Music Review 43/2–4 (2025)
  • Laura Emmery and Ivana Medić, eds., Serbian Musical Identity, in Contemporary Music Review 41/5–6 (2022)
  • Laura Emmery, ed., Serbian Musical Avant-Gardes, in Contemporary Music Review 40/5–6 (2021)
  • Laura Emmery and Benjamin Levy, Archival Research in Music: New Materials, Methods, and Arguments, in Music Theory Online 27.3 (2021)
  • Laura Emmery, ed., Further Studies from the Paul Sacher Stiftung, in Contemporary Music Review 38/3–4 (2019)
  • Laura Emmery, ed., Studies from the Paul Sacher Stiftung, in Contemporary Music Review 36/5 (2017)
    • Society for Music Theory Citation of Special Merit Publication Award finalist, 2020 
Recent and Forthcoming Peer-Reviewed Articles
  • Laura Emmery, “Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Kronos Quartet Collaborations: Exploring Identity, Place, and Belonging,” Contemporary Music Review 44/1–4 (2026)
  • Laura Emmery, “The Student Cultural Center in Belgrade as a Cultural Phenomenon and a Propagator of Yugoslav Experimental Minimalism,” Contemporary Music Review 43/2–4 (2025)
  • Laura Emmery, “Dragutin Gostuški's Theories of Time and Space Within the Historical and Cultural Context of American Modernist Aesthetics,” in Искошени угао Драгутина Гостушког [The Acute Angle of Dragutin Gostuški], ed. Katarina Tomašević and Bojana Radovanović (Belgrade: Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts 2025)
  • Laura Emmery and Ivana Miladinović Prica, “‘The Different New Music in Yugoslavia’: The Earliest Minimalist Manifestations,” Journal of Art and Media Studies 34 (2024)
  • Laura Emmery, “The Bad Plus Stravinsky: Metrical Displacement, Segmentation, and Stratification in the Jazz Trio’s Original Works,” Jazzforschung/Jazz Studies 50–51 (2024): 181–208
  • Laura Emmery, “Globalization and Musical Identity: The Reception of Serbian Émigré Composers in the United States,” Contemporary Music Review 41/5–6 (2022): 666–89
  • Laura Emmery, “Jonathan Harvey’s String Trio: The Rustic and the Sacred,” New Sound 60/2 (2022): 149–76, tr. in Serbian, “Гудачки трио Џонатана Харвија: рустично и духовно”
  • Laura Emmery, “What Dreams May Come: Art Synthesis in Vladan Radovanović’s Radiophonic Work Small Eternal Lake (1984),” Contemporary Music Review 40/5–6 (2021): 512–44
  • Laura Emmery, “Gender Identity and Gestural Representations in Jonathan Harvey’s String Quartet No. 2,” Music Theory Online3 (2021)
  • Laura Emmery, “Elliott Carter’s First String Quartet: In Search of Proustian Time,” The Musical Quarterly 101/3 (2020): 1–41
  • Laura Emmery, “Elliott Carter's and Luigi Nono's Analyses of Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31: Divergent Approaches to Serialism,” Twentieth-Century Music 16/2 (2019): 191–229
  • Laura Emmery, “Beyond Long-Range Polyrhythms: Harmonic Process in Elliott Carter’s Fourth String Quartet,” Contemporary Music Review 38/3–4 (2019): 316–43
  • Laura Emmery, “‘Workshop Minnesota’: Elliott Carter’s Analysis of Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso,” Elliott Carter Studies Online Volume 3 (2018)
  • Laura Emmery, “Formation of a New Harmonic Language in Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 2,” Contemporary Music Review 36/5 (2017): 388–405
  • Laura Emmery, “Form and Spatialization in the Third String Quartet of Elliott Carter,” Sonus 36/1 (2015): 20–28
  • Laura Emmery, “In Disguise: Musical Borrowings in Elliott Carter’s Early String Quartets,” in Form and Process in Music, 1300–2014: An Analytical Sampler, ed. Jack Boss et al., 125–46 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015)
  • Laura Emmery, “Rhythmic Process in Elliott Carter’s Fourth String Quartet,” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 26 (2013): 29–33
  • Laura Emmery, “An American Modernist: Teatime with Elliott Carter.” Tempo 67/264 (2013): 22–29
Co-Authored Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
  • Kazanski M, Dharanendra S, Rosenberg M, Chen D, Brown ER, Emmery L, McKay JL, Kesar T, Hackney ME, “Life-long music and dance relationships inform impressions of music- and dance-based movement therapies in individuals with and without mild cognitive impairment,” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (forthcoming)
  • Slusarenko A, Rosenberg M, Kazanski M, McKay JL, Emmery L, Kesar T, Hackney ME, “Associations Between Music and Dance Relationships, Rhythmic Proficiency, and Spatiotemporal Movement Modulation Ability in Adults with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment,” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (forthcoming)
  • Emmery, Laura, Hackney M, Kesar T, McKay JL, Rosenberg M, “An Integrated Review of Music Cognition and Rhythmic Stimuli in Sensorimotor Neurocognition and Neurorehabilitation,” Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 1530/1 (2023): 74–86
  • Rosenberg M, Slusarenko A, Cao K, Mckay JL, Emmery L, Kesar T, Hackney ME, “Motor and cognitive deficits limit the ability to flexibly modulate spatiotemporal gait features in older adults with mild cognitive impairment,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: Motor Neuroscience 17 (2023)
Reviews and Other Publications
  • Laura Emmery and Ivana Medić, “Serbian Musical Identity: An Introduction,” Contemporary Music Review 41/5–6 (2022)
  • Laura Emmery, “Serbian Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Avant-Gardes: An Introduction,” Contemporary Music Review 40/5–6 (2021): 471–481
  • Benjamin R. Levy and Laura Emmery, “Archival Research in Music: New Materials, Methods, and Arguments,” Music Theory Online 27.3 (2021)
  • Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music, eds. Danijela Š. Beard and Ljerka Rasmussen (Routledge). Review by Laura Emmery, Muzikološki Zbornik/Musicological Annual 75/1 (2021): 277–282
  • Laura Emmery, “Introduction: Further Studies from the Paul Sacher Stiftung,” Contemporary Music Review 38/3–4 (2019): 225–28
  • Laura Emmery, “Introduction: Studies from the Paul Sacher Stiftung,” Contemporary Music Review 36/5 (2017): 335–36
  • Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1960-2000, eds. Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft (Oxford University Press). Review by Laura Emmery, Music Theory Online 23/4 (2017)
  • Elliott Carter Studies, eds. Marguerite Boland and John Link. Review by Laura Emmery, Twentieth-Century Music 10/2 (2013): 304–10