Dorian Bandy
Professor
![Dorian Bandy Dorian Bandy](https://www.mcgill.ca/music/files/music/styles/medium_focal__220_x_220_/public/dorian_2406042379_web._profile.jpg?itok=0qz_RAg6)
BA, Cornell University
MMus, Royal Academy of Music (London)
PhD, University of Glasgow
Musicology; historical performance practice; philosophy of music
Dorian Bandy is a musicologist and performer with wide-ranging interests in the 17th through early 19th centuries.
Dorian's academic work, which draws from music history, theory, and philosophy, focuses on Mozart and Beethoven. He is the author of Mozart the Performer: Variations on the Showman's Art, an interpretive guide to Mozart's output based on analytic accounts of his solo keyboard works, concertos, symphonies, and operas. Dorian's other research interests include German instrumental music c.1660-1720 and Lieder c.1780-1840, as well as various issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of music (including the work concept, meme theory, musical meaning, and the philosophy of historical performance), and philosophical artworks more broadly (especially Stephen Sondheim's musicals). His writings on these and related topics have appeared in publications ranging from leading academic journals to blogs such as violinist.com and aestheticsforbirds.com. He is a member of the Re:Enlightenment collective.
Alongside his scholarly work, Dorian is active as a conductor, baroque violinist, and historical keyboardist. His repertoire spans four centuries, and his performances—praised for their "impressive emotional scope" and a "virtuosity [that is] relentless, precise, and above all, dazzling" (The Whole Note)—have taken him to venues across Europe and North America, including London’s Wigmore and Cadogan Halls, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and New York’s Symphony Space. As a conductor, he has served as music director of orchestras and opera companies on both sides of the Atlantic, garnering acclaim for his "unquestionable theatricality" and "palpable passion" (Opera Today) and ability, when conducting Mozart's operas, to "tread the line between joy and sadness" (Opera Now).
William Dawson Scholar
MUHL 286 (Critical Thinking About Music)
MUHL 366 (Era of the Fortepiano)
MUHL 383 (Classical Music)
MUPP 381 (Topics in Historical Performance)
Graduate seminars: Music and the solitary; Mozart in the marketplace; Adventures in musical subjectivity; Philosophy of historical performance; Approaches to musical meaning; Research methods in music
Performance: Baroque orchestra, chamber music coaching, private lessons, vocal coaching, etc.
Monograph:
Mozart the Performer: Variations on the Showman's Art (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
Articles:
"When is the brilliant style not the brilliant style? Topical mention, ambivalence, and negation in Mozart and Beethoven." Journal of Musicology (forthcoming)
"Donna Elvira and the dark places of the heart." Journal of the Royal Musical Association (forthcoming)
"Beethoven's rhetoric of embellishment." 19th-Century Music 46/2
"Mozart's operatic embellishments." Cambridge Opera Journal 33/1-2
"Thema da capo: another look at Mozart's embellishments." Eighteenth-Century Music 19/1
"Violin technique and the contrapuntal imagination in 17th-century German lands." Early Music 49/2
Book chapters:
"Variation at the intersection of performance and composition in the 17th and 18th centuries," in The Oxford Handbook of Variation and Melodic Techniques (forthcoming)
Reviews:
Review essays in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Beethoven Journal, and the Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America
Mozart: String Duos and Arrangements, including two premieres (forthcoming, 2024)
Lovers and Mourners: Sonatas and Variations by Becker, Biber, Pisendel, Schenck, and Walther (2023)
Telemann: 1715 Violin Sonatas, including one premiere (2018)