Daniel Harrison

Allen Forte Professor of Music 

Dan Harrison, B.A. Stanford University, Ph.D. Yale University, faculty member at Yale since 2003: You are a music theorist whose analytical work has been central to our understanding of early and late tonality in the European and American traditions. As a trained organist, your earliest published writings opened up new and influential perspectives, both trivial and quadrivial, on one of the oldest topics in academic music theory: the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries. 

Your first book, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music, recognized with the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award, freshly reassessed writings of late 19th-century harmonic theorists and productively applied them to contemporaneous music that those same theorists scorned: the intensely chromatic music of Reger, Franck, and Strauss.  Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music proposes a new set of approaches to a modern tonal culture in the suburbs of a venerable common practice. In bestowing its Wallace Berry Award, the Society for Music Theory recognized your “brilliant grappling” with how modern tonality works.  

Through your published articles, you have enhanced understanding of musical sequences, cadences, and the music and cultural position of the Beach Boys. An exceptional writer, your ability to squeeze juice out of extended metaphor has been the envy and inspiration of colleagues across the fields of music scholarship.  

You have passed along the rigorous skills of the early-modern Kappellmeister to generations of students in Yale College, while working connecting those skills to the needs of young musicians living in a diverse musical culture. You attracted Yale’s strongest music theory PhD students into your laboratory, trained them rigorously, supported their imaginative research across six centuries of music theory and analysis, and helped them launch award-winning careers.  You served as editor-in-chief of both of your field’s leading publications, earned the gratitude of your Yale colleagues by devoting countless productive hours to the Journal of Music Theory, and chaired the Society for Music Theory’s Publications Committee.  As Chair of the Department of Music, you envisioned and catalyzed a move into the renovated Stoeckel Hall, which vastly improved everyday life in the department. You also served Yale as Chair of Theater and Performance Studies and as Chair of the Creative Arts Committee, which oversees the arts curriculum in Yale College, and chair of the committee that inaugurated President Peter Salovey. 

At Yale, you have been a Ph.D. student, an endowed professor bearing the name of your late mentor, and leader of the department and journal that your own mentors developed. No one has borne their Yale affiliation with greater pride. As you plan for your retirement in Vermont, Yale University takes just as much pride in its affiliation with you.  When you take a break from synthesizing your lifetime work on Baroque counterpoint, we invite you to imagine what your presence at Yale wrought: your colleagues and their students working in more comfortable quarters; Ph.D. students taking pride in their own successful careers, fueled by your mentorship; music scholars,  studying historical and contemporary repertories,  grappling with and developing your insights; and some young scholar, chuckling at one of your long-squozen metaphors, and realizing that the field on which music theorists play need not be dry.