Bio
Sylvie Tran is a music theorist who studies questions of music, place, and identity, primarily in American classical music. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sylvie holds a B.M. in flute performance from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is now a PhD candidate in music theory at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examines musical portrayals of the American West in classical music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through lenses of race, gender, and landscape and the environment. This work received the Dorothy Payne Award for Best Student Paper at the annual meeting of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic in 2022. Some of Sylvie’s secondary research interests include performance and analysis, particularly the intersubjective aspects of chamber music performance; the politics of arrangement and reorchestration in Western art music; and music theory pedagogy.
