Steven Nuss

Areas of Expertise

• Music theory (Western and Japanese)
• Music composition
• World music
• Traditional Japanese music and culture
• Interdisciplinary approaches to music analysis
• The music of Morton Feldman
• Music and ritual in Rinzai Zen Buddhism

Personal Information

Professor Nuss received his Ph.D. in music theory from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he was a Gilleece Fellow as well as a graduate instructor at Queens College. His dissertation demonstrated Toru Takemitsu's substantial debt to forms, sounds, and performance techniques of traditional Japanese music.

A former orchestral conducting fellow of the Aspen Music Festival, faculty member of the Seishin International School and University in Tokyo, and former student of famed Kanze Noh actor Tsuta Kazutada, his research is a unique blend of Western and non-Western analytical techniques and theoretical models of form and process. His work has appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Contemporary Music Review, Music Theory Spectrum, Theory and Practice, and analytical essays have appeared in A Way Alone: Writings on Toru Takemitsu, published by Academia Musicae, and Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, published by Wesleyan University Press.

In 2018 Christian Longchamp, noted artistic adviser and dramaturg with the Opéra national de Paris and Strasbourg’s Opéra national du Rhin, commissioned Professor Nuss to write the program essay for the first performance in France of Japanese composer Toshiro Mayuzumi’s grand opera Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Based on the novel of the same name by renowned Japanese author Yukio Mishima, this production of Kinkakuji was the central event at the Arsmondo Japan festival in Strasbourg in March 2018.

Professor Nuss has presented his research at a wide range of academic conferences in the United States, Japan, the UK, Canada, and Indonesia, as well as at invited lectures at Yale University, Tokyo University, Lawrence University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Catholic University, Columbia University, and Fordham University, among others. Professor Nuss is currently at work on a collection of essays that explores the influences of Jewish devotional and ritual thought in the music of Morton Feldman. He is a recipient of grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently at work on an alphanumerical analysis of Morton Feldman's For Philip Guston.