Gordon Sly

(he/him)

Professor of Music Theory

Gordon Sly is Professor of Music Theory in the College of Music at Michigan State University. He specializes in the music of Benjamin Britten and the analytical approach of Heinrich Schenker.

Sly’s dissertation (Eastman School of Music, 1995) focused on a group of sonata-form movements of Schubert, whose “off-tonic” recapitulations contravene the normative unfolding of the form’s voice-leading structure. This work led to a series of articles, the entry on “sonata form” for Oxford Bibliographies, and culminated in his edited book for Ashgate in 2009, Keys to the Drama: Nine Perspectives on Sonata Forms, which assembled essays dealing with various anomalies in sonata forms. His own chapter, “Design and Structure in Schubert’s Sonata Forms: An Evolution Toward Integration,” is a consequent to his 2001 Journal of Music Theory article, “Schubert’s Innovations in Sonata Form: Compositional Logic and Structural Interpretation.”

In recent years, Sly has focused on Britten’s music. He contributed a chapter on the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings to the 2017 publication Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium, and a chapter on The Holy Sonnets of John Donne to 20th- and 21st-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance, a volume that he co-edited with colleague Michael Callahan for Routledge (2020). His most recent book is Britten’s Donne, Hardy, and Blake Songs: Cyclic Design and Meaning, an analytical study of The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, op 35, Winter Words: Lyrics and Ballads of Thomas Hardy, op. 52, and Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, op. 74 (Boydell & Brewer, 2023). His current book project, Britten Grounded: The Role of Passacaglia in his Music, explores Britten’s works that feature passacaglias—nineteen in all, including seven of the operas, as well as several larger works, both texted and purely instrumental.

Sly has been on the MSU faculty since 1999 and served as Theory Area chair from 2001-12. He currently teaches undergraduate courses in the music theory sequence and regularly-offered graduate courses in Schenker’s approach, music theory pedagogy, analytical process in “post-atonal tonal” music, and 16th-century counterpoint—as well as occasionally-offered seminars in 20th- and 21st-Century Song Cycle and in the music of Britten.