Society for Music Research
Sylvie Tran
Music Theory
Dissertation: The American West in Musical Imagination, 1910–2017 (2025)
Sylvie Tran is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and she holds a B.M. in flute performance from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in music theory from the University of Michigan. She studies questions of music, place, and identity, primarily in American classical music; 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. In her free time, Sylvie enjoys cooking spicy food, reading murder mysteries, and walking and running in Ann Arbor’s many parks.
Posts
- Sylvie Tran presents at WLA 2022 – November 02, 2022
- SMR members present at Music Theory Midwest – May 09, 2022
- SMR Hosts Midwest Graduate Music Consortium 2021 Conference – April 19, 2021
- SMR at MGMC 2020 – March 10, 2020
