Benjamin Binder

Associate Professor of Music Benjamin Binder joined the musicianship faculty of the Mary Pappert School of Music in the fall of 2008, after holding a two-year teaching position at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. At Duquesne, Dr. Binder teaches musicology and music history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is also a collaborative pianist, and he believes passionately in the close connection between scholarship and performance, a connection which he actively pursues in his own professional life and encourages his students to explore in his courses.

Dr. Binder holds a master's degree in piano performance from Washington University and a Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University. His work on German Romantic music, art song, and classical music performance has been published in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Current Musicology, Music Theory Online, and in edited volumes from Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge. He has presented papers at regional, national, and international scholarly conferences, including meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, the Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium, the Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, and the Biennial North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. He has also written a script for Thomas Hampson's Song: Mirror of the World public radio series which has been broadcasted nationwide on the WFMT Radio Network. In general, his scholarly and teaching interests include European music and culture of the long nineteenth century, German Romanticism, art song, the intersection of criticism, analysis, and performance, interdisciplinary performance studies, and creative forms of audience engagement and concert innovation in classical music.

As a pianist, Dr. Binder has been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and a participant in the Cleveland Institute of Music Art Song Festival. He has accompanied vocal and instrumental recitals throughout North America. As artistic and general director of the Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, he regularly presents innovative song recitals throughout the Pittsburgh area and beyond, including collaborations with the Carnegie Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum, and City of Asylum.

From 2010-14, working together with pianist and vocal coach Cameron Stowe of the New England Conservatory, Dr. Binder was the director and co-founder of the Vancouver International Song Institute's Song Scholarship and Performance program at the University of British Columbia, a unique song workshop and summer course for performers, musicologists, theorists, and literary scholars. The program brought together groups of students and professionals (including scholars Susan Youens, Jane Brown, Richard Kramer, Kristina Muxfeldt, Michael Musgrave, Harald Krebs, Sharon Krebs, Deborah Stein, Jennifer Ronyak, and Sherry Lee, and performers Graham Johnson, Thomas Allen, Ann Murray, and Margo Garrett) to encourage cross-disciplinary approaches in the study of song.

Ph.D., Princeton University
M.A., Princeton University
M.M., Washington University
B.A., Yale University