Blake Stevens

Associate Professor, Music History

Address: Cato Center, Room 208
Phone: 843.953.8220
E-mail: stevensb@cofc.edu


Blake Stevens is Associate Professor of Music History at the College of Charleston. His research and teaching interests include the history of opera, music aesthetics, and electronic music. He received a Ph.D. in Music History from Stanford University, writing a dissertation on the tradition of the monologue in French tragedy and opera in the ancien régime ("Solitary Persuasions: The Concept of the Monologue in French Opera from Lully to Rameau," 2007). His doctoral research was recognized with a grant from the Georges Lurcy Trust for archival work in Paris and a year-long residency at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Professor Stevens has published in the Journal of Musicology, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music and Letters, and Eighteenth-Century Music. He has given papers at national and international conferences, including national meetings of the American Musicological Society, the congress of the International Musicological Society, and the annual conference of the Royal Musical Association.

Education

PhD in Musicology, Stanford University, 2007

Research Interests

  • Electronic/electroacoustic music
  • French opera in the 17th and 18th centuries
  • History of music aesthetics

 

Courses Taught

  • MUSC 223 - History of Electronic Music: Electronica, Rock, and the Avant-Garde
  • MUSC 225 - The Beatles and Musical Culture of the 1960s
  • MUSC 230 - Masterworks of Music Literature
  • HONS 390 - Honors Advanced Special Topics Seminar
  • MUSC 381 - Music History I
  • MUSC 382 - Music History II
  • MUSC 444 - Selected Topics in Music History

 

Publications

  • Editor, Teaching Electronic Music: Cultural, Analytical, and Creative Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2021).
  • "Connecting Music and Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Learning Community for First-Year University Students,” co-authored with Bill Manaris, in Performing Arts As High-Impact Practice, ed. Michelle Hayford and Susan Kattwinkel (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 68–82.
  • Review of Sylvie Bouissou, Graham Sadler, and Solveig Serre, eds., Rameau: entre art et science, in Eighteenth-Century Music 15 (March 2018), 53–54.
  • Review of Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History, in Music and Letters 99 (February 2018), 121–24.
  • "JythonMusic: an environment for teaching algorithmic music composition, dynamic coding, and musical performativity,” co-authored with Bill Manaris and Andrew R. Brown, in Journal of Music, Technology, and Education 9 (2016), 33–56.
  • “The Spectacular Imagination and the Rhetoric of Absence in Armide,” in Silence and Absence in Literature and Music, eds. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 47-62.
  • "The Production of Space in the Tragédie en Musique: 'Absence Effects' in Lully and Quinault's Atys," Music and Letters 96 (2015), 509-33.
  • Review of Simon Trezise, ed., The Cambridge Companion to French Music, in Music and Letters 96 (November 2015), 655–57.
  • “Transpositions of Spectacle and Time: The Entr’acte in the Tragédie en musique,” Eighteenth-Century Music 11 (2014), 11-29.
  • “Monologue Conflicts: The Terms of Operatic Criticism in Pierre Estève and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Journal of Musicology 29 (2012), 1-43.
  • Review of Tili Boon Cuillé, Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts, in Cambridge Opera Journal 20 (2008), 237-40.