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 classical 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 19th-century Austro-German 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. Most recently, his book The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology (a co-edited essay collection with Dr. Jennifer Ronyak) has been published by Cambridge. Dr. Binder has also 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, the Biennial North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, and the Cascade Song Festival. His script for Thomas Hampson's Song: Mirror of the World public radio series has been broadcast nationwide in the USA on the WFMT Radio Network and in Germany on SWR2/SWR Kultur. In general, his scholarly and teaching interests include European music and culture of the long nineteenth century (especially Austro-German chamber music), 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. He regularly presents innovative song recitals and solo performances 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 leading musicologists, music theorists, and performers in the field, 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

• History of Western music
• Art song

• 19th-century music and culture

• 19th-century Austro-German chamber music

• Classical music performance

• Audience engagement and concert innovation

• Interdisciplinary performance studies