Associate Professor, School of Music, Ohio State University
Areas of Expertise • Music of fin-de-siécle Vienna • Modernism and postmodern thinking • Composition and music criticism • Mass media, film studies, popular culture and historiography
Professor Ashby, a Fulbright scholar and AMS 50 fellow, studies European and American art music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His doctoral work was a study of the compositional aesthetics and methodologies of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926). The compositional aspects and aesthetic implications of the Schoenberg-Berg relationship are the focus of an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society for which he received the 1996 Alfred Einstein Award from the AAssociate Professor, School of Music, Ohio State University
Areas of Expertise • Music of fin-de-siécle Vienna • Modernism and postmodern thinking • Composition and music criticism • Mass media, film studies, popular culture and historiography
Professor Ashby, a Fulbright scholar and AMS 50 fellow, studies European and American art music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His doctoral work was a study of the compositional aesthetics and methodologies of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926). The compositional aspects and aesthetic implications of the Schoenberg-Berg relationship are the focus of an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society for which he received the 1996 Alfred Einstein Award from the AMS. He edited and contributed to the book Listening to Modernism: Intention, Meaning, and the Compositional Avant-garde (University of Rohester Press). Professor Ashby has also published on Berg’s revisionist use of Peter Altenberg’s poetry in his Altenberg-Lieder, Benjamin Britten’s Symphonic Output, and Frank Zappa’s Orchestral Works. A recent JAMS article ("Schoenberg Boulez and Twelve-Tone Composition as Ideal-Type") discusses twelve-tone music from a cultural-historical perspective, using models from social science and the history of science. He has contributed to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and wrote criticism for the American Record Guide between 1987 and 2001.
Education • PhD, Yale University • M Phil, Yale University • BM, Northwestern University • BA, English, Northwestern University ...more