Michael Callahan
(he/him)
Associate Professor of Music Theory
Chairperson, Music Theory Area
Michael Callahan is associate professor of music theory in the College of Music at Michigan State University, where he has taught since 2010 and served as area chairperson of music theory since 2014. He has taught the first-year aural skills curriculum; the first, third, and fourth semesters of the music theory core; and graduate courses in music theory pedagogy, keyboard skills, and counterpoint.
2020 saw the publication of a book that Callahan co-edited with Gordon Sly, entitled Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles for Voice and Piano, which brings together analytical essays for an audience of both performers and scholars. The project stemmed from a conference that he and Sly co-hosted at Michigan State University in 2018, which paired scholarly presentations on fourteen post-1900 song cycles with full, live performances of those same works.
Callahan has also joined Steven Laitz as co-author of the undergraduate music theory textbook The Complete Musician beginning with its fifth edition, which was published in 2022.
Callahan’s research has dealt with music theory pedagogy, particularly through various forms of music-making and improvisation; eighteenth-century counterpoint; and texted music from the Great American Songbook and elsewhere. He has published articles and reviews in journals such as Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online (x2), Theory and Practice, Intégral, the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy (x2), and Music Performance Research, as well as chapters in edited volumes on historical improvisation and music theory pedagogy.
Callahan’s accomplishments as a teacher have been recognized at both the university and the college level. He received the Dortha J. and John D. Withrow Award for Excellence in Teaching (2020); the prestigious university-wide Teacher-Scholar Award (2014), which recognizes outstanding achievement among early-career faculty members; and the Lilly Teaching Fellowship (2013–14), which permitted him to explore the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as part of an interdisciplinary cohort. Both the fellowship and a Humanities and Arts Research Program grant (2015) seeded the design of a new curricular method that infuses active, hands-on music making into all of his undergraduate and graduate music theory teaching.
Another HARP grant will facilitate the preparation of monograph entitled Music Theory and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Committed to outreach and engagement, Callahan enjoys sharing his observations about musical works with concert audiences in the Lansing area. He also performs occasionally on piano and harpsichord, specializing in improvised continuo playing. He currently serves the music theory discipline as a member of the Society for Music Theory’s Publication Awards Committee and the editorial board of the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and as a reader for the Advanced Placement Music Theory exam.
Callahan earned a B.A. in music (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Harvard University in 2004 and both an M.A. (2008) and a Ph.D. (2010) in music theory from the Eastman School of Music, where he received the Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student, the Jack L. Frank Award for Excellence in Community Teaching, the Teaching Assistant Prize, and the Alfred Mann Dissertation Award.