Professor Emeritus Patricia Hall Gives Lecture as Part of Teaching Excellence Award

Professor Emeritus Patricia Hall (music theory) received the SMTD Teaching Excellence Award in 2024, and as part of that award, she will be presenting a special lecture that is open to all. Titled “Bringing the Composer’s Workshop into the Classroom,” the lecture will take place on Thursday, February 20, 2025, from 5:00–6:00 pm, in Watkins Lecture Hall, which is in the Earl V. Moore Building. The lecture is free and no tickets are required.

Hall described the lecture topic this way:

Music manuscripts revealing a composer’s compositional process can give valuable insights to undergraduate students, even in their early stages of study. In this presentation I examine manuscripts by Beethoven, Berg, and Bartholomew and discuss ways that a compositional approach to music theory instruction might engender a more open and creative atmosphere, while still incorporating the rigor of harmony and voice-leading rules.

Hall came to SMTD in 2011; she served as chair of the Department of Music Theory from 2011 to 2017 and retired from the department in May 2024. She is the author of A View of Berg’s Lulu Through the Autograph Sources (University of California Press, 1997, winner of the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award) and Berg’s Wozzeck (Oxford University Press, 2011). She is co-editor, with Friedemann Sallis, of A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and general editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Hall founded the online journal Music & Politics and was editor from 2007 to 2017. She served as the president of the Society for Music Theory from 2019 through 2021. She has been researching manuscripts at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for the last eight years and was recently interviewed on PBS News Hour. Performances of the Music from Auschwitz manuscripts took place in January 2025 for International Holocaust Remembrance Day at Wigmore Hall, London; Music of Remembrance, Seattle; and at the Auschwitz and Dachau Memorials.