CCM welcomes new music theory faculty member Sam Reenan

Reenan holds a PhD and MA in music theory from the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) and bachelor’s degrees in music theory and biological sciences from the University of Connecticut.

As an educator, Reenan strives to facilitate students’ growth as engaged musical thinkers, communicators and respectful collaborators. Prior to his appointment at CCM, Reenan served as Theory Coordinator and Director of Graduate Studies at Miami University, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses across all stages of the music theory and aural skills curriculum. As part of an interdisciplinary faculty team, he was awarded the Roger and Joyce Howe Award for Excellence in Disciplinary Writing Instruction for his role in collaboratively designing an arts writing course open to all majors.

Issues of symphonic thought, genre mixture, large-scale form and identity figure prominently in Reenan’s research program. His first book, Symphonic Spectacles: Form, Identity, and Hybridity in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2025), explores these issues across a range of Germanic, American and British symphonic works. His writings are published in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online (2022, 2016), Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy and Music & Letters. He has presented at scholarly conferences across Europe and North America, including in Italy, Belgium, England and France. His current research projects examine formal interpretation in twentieth-century music, the symphonic music of Gustav Mahler, intersections between new music and ecosystems ecology, and the concept of musical fluency in undergraduate pedagogy.