Directory

Degrees

• Ph.D., musicology (music aesthetics concentration), University of Music and Performing Arts Graz in Austria
• M.A., Music History and Theory, Stony Brook University 
• M.M., Piano Performance, Binghamton University 
• B.A., Music, State University of New York, New Paltz

Certificates

• Data Management course, Digital Humanities Summer School, Oxford University, 2015
• Google UX Design, Professional Certificate, 2021

Profile

Dr. Daniele Shlomit Sofer (they/them) is Assistant Professor of music theory and music technology at the University of Dayton and co-founder of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group.

Dr Sofer’s scholarship examines various means of electronic mediation, exploring how gender cuts dynamically across current social justice activism, postcolonial resistances, as well as historical and systemic constitutions of race and sexuality. Their publications interrogating networks of association via gender, sexuality, race, class, geography and other aspects of human networks appear in American Music, Contemporary Music Review, Organised Sound, and Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie. Developing these themes further, their monograph, Making Sex Sound: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music (MIT Press 2022) features detailed analyses of music as wide-ranging as Schaeffer and Henry’s Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950-1), Pauline Oliveros’s “eye fuck!” (1992), Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You, Baby” (1975), TLC’s FanMail (1999) and several recent songs by Janelle Monáe and THEESatisfaction. Their volume Elizabeth Maconchy: Music as Impassioned Argument (Universal Edition, 2018), edited with Christa Brüstle, is the first full-length book dedicated to the composer, and features contributions from her two daughters, family photos, and a complete list of the composer’s works. More recently, they have presented new research investigating music’s analytical past, from spectrographs to recommendation algorithms, at the Society for Music Theory, the Society for the History of Technology, and the American Studies Association. This research anticipates two forthcoming publications, one, an essay collection edited together with Christopher Haworth and Edward K Spencer, as well as proceedings from the conference “Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures” (Harvard University).

Working to improve, expand, and broaden definitions of scholarly engagement, as part of their work with the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group, Dr. Sofer coordinates workshops for university students, educators, researchers and administrators to consider the unique experiences of LGBTQ2IA+ individuals in higher education as well as facilitating dialogues between individuals across many academic domains to empower individuals and strengthen their pipelines toward success. They are invested in initiatives that lift up members of communities traditionally marginalized by university’s opaque organization by introducing sustainable and long-term access to open educational resources. Emerging from these ambitions, they are editing a collective response to Philip Ewell’s momentous On Music Theory, forthcoming in Journal of Musicological Research.

Dr. Sofer graduated summa cum laude from the State University of New York at New Paltz with a B.A. in music performance (viola and piano) and honors. They hold Master’s degrees from Binghamton University (New York) in piano performance and Stony Brook University (New York) in music history and theory, with a thesis on Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler, a project that brought them to St. Petersburg, Russia, as an Erasmus student. Dr. Sofer studied music theory at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, working as an assistant to Brian Hyer, and thereafter completed a Ph.D. with distinction at the Kunstuniversität Graz, where their dissertation in the faculty of the Institute for Musical Criticism and Aesthetical Research, advised by Andreas Dorschel, was awarded with distinction. Dr. Sofer’s work has also been awarded funding from the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society’s AMS 75 Publication Awards for Young Scholars Endowment, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Förderprogramm Forschung 2013+, and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Dr. Sofer has enjoyed touring as a violist, fiddler, chorister, répétiteur, and sound technician, performing in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Graz, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and many smaller cities around the globe.

Faculty perspective

"My interests include electronic and computer music, and I aim to understand sociological aspects related to listening and composing music. I welcome students interested in learning how music intersects with analysis, technology (computers, video games, amplification, beat-making) and philosophy. I have a special interest in sounds of the local environment (wherever I happen to be) and aspire to work within a constellation of ethical sonic practices, including ethically engaging with music’s aural associations to gender, sexuality and race."

Professional activities and affiliations

• 2021: International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR)
• 2020: Women in Music Information Retrieval (WiMIR) 
• 2016: Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI)
• 2011: Society for Music Theory (SMT), Publications Awards Committee (2021-23)
• 2010: American Musicological Society (AMS)

Courses taught

• Fundamentals of Music
• Music Theory 1
• Music Theory 2
• Post-Tonal Analysis
• Introduction to Music Technology
• Advanced Music Technology
• Introduction to Musicology & Ethnomusicology
• Music and Sexuality
• Music and Identity
• Music and Meaning in the West
• Class Piano
• String Quartet

Publications

Monographs

In progress: Listening Through Machines: Sociotechnical Bias & Inclusion in Digitized Music.

2022: Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music, MIT Press. ISBN-9780262045193.

Edited Volumes

In preparation: Editor of Colloquy response to Philip Ewell, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, Journal of Musicological Research.

2024: Christopher Haworth, Daniele Shlomit Sofer, and Edward Spencer, eds., Music and the Internet: Methodological, Epistemological, and Ethical Orientations, Routledge.

2024: Commissioned Guest Editor of Special Issue, “Queers from Concert Hall to Classroom.” Contemporary Music Review. 

2018: Christa Brüstle and Daniele Sofer, eds., Elizabeth Maconchy: Music as Impassioned Argument. Vienna – London – New York: Universal Edition. ISBN-10: 3702475621.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

2020: “Categorizing Electronic Music,” Contemporary Music Review 39/2, Special Issue, “Contemporaneities,” ed. Patrick Valiquet, 231-251. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2020.1806628

2020: “Spectres of Sex: Tracing the Tools and Techniques of Contemporary Music Analysis,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 17/1, Special Issue, “Music Theory and Gender Studies,” eds. Cosima Linke and Ariane Jeßulat, 31–63. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31751/1029

2018: “Breaking Silence, Breaching Censorship: ‘Ongoing Interculturality’ in Alice Shields’s Electronic Opera Apocalypse.” American Music 36/2, 135-162. Recipient of subventions from the AMS and the SMT (2017), DOI: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.2.0135 

2018: “The Macropolitics of Microsound: Gender and Sexual Identities in Barry Truax’s Song of Songs.” Organised Sound 23/1, 80-90, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771817000309

Invited Articles, essay and notes

In preparation: “Reason and Measurement in Automated Music Analysis.” Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures, Landon Morrison, ed., Oxford University Press.

In preparation: Chapter on Elizabeth Maconchy’s Operas. In Justin Vickers and Lucy Walker, Maconchy in Context, Cambridge University Press.

In preparation: “Seattle’s Musical & Racial Schism in the Time of Personal Computing.” In Christopher Haworth, Daniele Shlomit Sofer, and Edward Spencer, eds., Music and the Internet: Methodological, Epistemological, and Ethical Orientations, Routledge.

2022: “Playing by the Rules in the House of the Dead” Engaged Music Theory Blog. https://engagedmusictheory.com/2022/05/17/playing-by-the-rules-in-the-house-of-the-dead/

2021: “Le sexe comme champ d’investigation: Réévaluer les outils et techniques d’analyse de la musique contemporaine,” Circuit musiques contemporaines 31/1:, Special Issue, “Queer Speech and Music Creation,” translated by Vanessa Blais-Tremblay and Martine Rhéaume. https://revuecircuit.ca/articles/31_1/03-le-sexe-comme-champ-dinvestigation/

2018: “Death Becomes Him: Elizabeth Maconchy’s One-Act Opera The Departure,” in Elizabeth Maconchy: Music as Impassioned Argument, eds. Christa Brüstle and Daniele Sofer, Universal Edition, 180-196.

2017: “Strukturelles Hören?: Neue Perspektiven auf den ›idealen‹ Hörer,” in Geschichte und Gegenwart des musikalischen Hörens. Diskurse – Geschichente(n) - Poetiken, eds. Klaus Aringer, Franz Karl Praßl, Peter Revers und Christian Utz, Rombach Verlag, 107-132. 

2014: Review of “‘Platonic Rhizomes in Computer Music’: Concert and Keynote Speaker Panel at the 2014 joint conference of the International Computer Music Association and the Sound and Music Computing Conference,” Array: The Journal of the International Computer Music Association (2015-2016): 25. 

2014: Prefaces to study scores, “Erwin Schulhoff, Symphony No. 5,” and “Ludwig Thuille, Piano Quintet, Op. 20,” Repertoire & Opera Explorer. Munich: Musikproduction Jürgen Höflich. 

2010-14: Concert notes for “Clocks in Motion” Percussion Ensemble; Chamber Music Silicon Valley; Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra.

Reviews

2024: Review of Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory, ed. Gavin S.K. Lee, Music Theory Spectrum (forthcoming).

2024: “Authentically Otherwise: Targeting Gender in the Twenty-First Century,” review of Hearing Sexism: Gender in the Sound of Popular Music a Feminist Approach by L. J. Müller, trans. Manu Reyes, Women & Music (forthcoming).

Conference Proceedings

2016 “Music in Transit: An Interactive Interview with Juliana Hodkinson.” The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research, eds. Paulo de Assis and Paulo Giudici: Open-Access Rich-Media Proceedings, Ghent, Belgium. Best Presentation Award Recipient. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/237890/237891

2014 “Eroticism and Time in Computer Music: Juliana Hodkinson and Niels Rønsholdt’s Fish & Fowl.” “Music Technology Meets Philosophy: From Digital Echoes to Virtual Ethos,” proceedings of the ICMC-SMC 2014: 40th International Computer Music Conference joint with the 11th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 14-20 September, Athens, Greece, volume 1: 148-153.