Music Department Faculty

Severine Neff
Eugene Falk Distinguished Professor

Office: 204 Hill Hall
Email: SevNeff@aol.com
Phone: 919-962-2276

Severine Neff (Eugene Falk Distinguished Professor) received a Bachelor of Arts in music magna cum laude from Columbia University (1971), a Master of Arts in music theory from Yale University (1972) and a Master of Fine Arts (1974) and Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University (1979). She has taught at Bates College, Barnard College of Columbia University, and the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati, before coming to UNC-CH in 1995. She has been a Fellow and Teaching Fellow at the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory (2004, 2005, 2007), a J. William Fulbright Senior Scholar (1998-99) at Moscow State Conservatory, Moscow, Russia, and has received research awards from The Korea Foundation (2006), The Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna (2003), the Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC-Chapel Hill (2002), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993), Newberry Library (1985), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at Cornell University (1981-83). Her research interests include twentieth-century music, particularly the works of Arnold Schoenberg. She is completing a facsimile edition of the autograph of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in F# Minor, Op. 10. Her next project is an edition of and commentary on Schoenberg’s writings about counterpoint. The text is part of a nine-volume set Schoenberg in Words that she is co-editing with Sabine Feisst for Oxford University Press.  Recently, she was named Editor-in-Chief of Music Theory Spectrum.

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS/EDITIONS:

Schoenberg on Counterpoint, 1911-51 (contracted and in progress)

The Autograph of Schoenberg's String Quartet in F# Minor, Opus 10. Madison, (contracted and in progress)

The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation by Arnold Schoenberg, and trans. with Patricia Carpenter, (Chinese ed.) ed., trans. Liu Shu (Beijing: Central Conservatory of Music, 2009) (forthcoming)

The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation by Arnold Schoenberg, (abridged ed.) ed. and trans. with Patricia Carpenter Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

String Quartet in F# Minor, Opus 10 by Arnold Schoenberg: A Norton Critical Score, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation by Arnold Schoenberg, ed. and trans. with Patricia Carpenter New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form/Zusammenhang, Kontrapunkt, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form by Arnold Schoenberg trans. with Charlotte M. Cross, Lincoln and London: The University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

EDITIONS OF JOURNALS, SCORES, SHORT MANUSCRIPTS:

“Foreward” and edition of My Horses Ain’t Hungry by Arnold Schoenberg (1935) with Sabine Feisst, reconstruction by Allen Anderson, (Pacific Palisades, CA: Belmont Music Publishers), 2007 (in press) [a hitherto unknown work I discovered at the Archive of the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna]

Reviews editor, Music Theory Spectrum, 1998-2001.

“Two Unpublished Manuscripts: Excerpts from Arnold Schoenberg's Second Book on Harmony and His Text on Performance,” Gamut: Journal of the Georgia Association of Music Theorists 8 (1998): 19-30.

Editor, Theory and Practice, Volumes 16-18 (1991-3)

SELECTED BOOK CHAPTERS/ARTICLES:

“An Unlikely Synergy: Lou Harrison and Arnold Schoenberg,” Journal of the Society for American Music (forthcoming 2009)

“Juxtaposing Popular Music in the Second String Quartet,” “I Feel the Air of Another Planet:” Schoenberg’s Chamber Music, Schoenberg’s World, ed. James Wright and Alan Gilmore (Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press, 2008) (in press)

“Cadence after Thirty-Three Years of Revolution: Tonal Form in Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony, Opus 38,” The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, ed. Joseph Auner and Jennifer Shaw (Cambridge University Press, 2008) (in press)

“‘A Kernel from the Tree of Life:’ Remarks on Schoenberg’s Earliest Waltzes,” Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 10 (forthcoming)

“Schenker, Schoenberg, and Goethe: Visions of the Organic Artwork,” in Schenker-Traditionen, ed. Martin Eybl (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 31-50.

“Scandal and Painting: Schönberg's Visual Art and His Second String Quartet, Op. 10,” Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 6 (2004): 63-75.

“‘The Air of Another Planet:’ George’s Entrückung and Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, Op. 10,” Korean trans. Helen Pyun, Music Journal of Hanyang University 12 (2004): 32-70.

“Schoenberg’s Kristallnacht Fugue: Contrapuntal Exercise or Unknown Piece?” The Musical Quarterly 86/1 (2002): 17-44.

“Reinventing the Organic Artwork: Schoenberg's Changing Images for Tonal Form,” Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years, eds. Russell Berman and Charlotte M. Cross (New York: Garland, 2001), 275-308.

“Schoenberg As Theorist: Three Forms of Presentation,” ed. Walter M. Frisch, Schoenberg and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 58-84.

With Patricia Carpenter, “Schoenberg's Philosophy of Composition: Thoughts on the Musical Idea and Its Presentation,” Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg in Twentieth-Century Culture, eds. Julianne Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 146-59.

“‘This I have learned from my students:’ The Teachings of Arnold Schoenberg,” Gamut: Journal of the Georgia Association of Music Theorists 7 (1997): 3-30.

“Revolution and Reaction: American Music Theory, 1955-95,” Chinese trans. Jin Ping, Journal of the Central Conservatory of Beijing 88 (1996): 71-78.

“Schönberg und Analyse: der Bearbeitung einer Coda von Brahms,” in Styl oder Gedanke: zur Schönberg-Rezeption in Amerika und Europa, herausgegben von Stefan Litwin und Klaus Velten, Schriftenreihe der Hochschule des Saarlandes für Musik und Theater, Band 3, Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag, 1995, 54-70.

“Silvina Milstein's Arnold Schoenberg: Notes, Sets, Forms,” Music Theory Spectrum 16/1 (1994): 108-22.

“Schoenberg and Analysis: Reworking a Coda of Brahms,” International Journal of Musicology 3 (1994): 187-201.

“Schoenberg's Theoretical Writings After the Harmonielehre: The Published and Unpublished Manuscripts,” College Music Symposium, 33/34 (1993-4): 172-90.

“Schoenberg and Goethe: Organicism and Analysis,” in Music Theory and The Exploration of the Past, eds. Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993): 409-33; Russian translation by Mikhail R. Krishtal in Schoenberg: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, ed. Eugenia Tschgerova and Elena Dolenko, Moscow, Moscow State Conservatory, 2002, 115-141. (First text on Schoenberg as a composer in the history of Russia)

“An American Precursor of Nontonal Theory: Ernst Bacon (1900-1990),” Current Musicology 48 (1990): 5-26.

“Otto Luening and the Theories of Bernhard Ziehn,” Current Musicology 39 (1985): 21-41.

“Aspects of Grundgestalt in Schoenberg's First String Quartet, Opus 7,” Theory and Practice 9/1-2 (1984): 1-57.

“Comments on Dunsby's Review of Maegaard’s Studien,” Perspectives of New Music 18/1-2 (1981): 426-431.

SELECTED REVIEWS/ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES:

“Glenn Dillard Gunn,” “Clarence Loomis,” “Marc Neikrug,” “Charlotte Moorman,” “Raoul Pleskow,” “Speculum Musicae,” in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie. (London: MacMillan & Co., 1986), 2/298; 3/ 269, 329-30, 579; 4/280-281.

“Wolfgang Rihm, Die Hamletmaschine, Oedipus,” Notes 46/3 (1990): 215-17.

“Otto Luening,” Dictionary of Contemporary Composers (London: St. James Press, 1992), 516-7.

“Clarence Loomis,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: MacMillan & Co., 1993), 426.

“Charlotte Moorman,” The New Grove Dictionary of Woman Composers, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: MacMillan & Co., 1994), 337.

“Tonality and Structure in Schoenberg’s Second Quartet by Catherine Dale: and Funktionelle Atonalität by Mark Delaere,” Notes 51/3 (1995): 914-8.

“The Early Tonal Works of Arnold Schoenberg by Walter Frisch,” Notes 51/4 (1995): 1289-91.

“Otto Luening,” “Charlotte Moorman,” “Marc Neikrug,” “Speculum Musicae,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie. (London: MacMillan & Co., 1998), 2/298; 3/ 269, 329-30, 579; 4/280-281.

“The Schoenberg Companion edited by Walter E. Bailey” Notes 55/4 (1999): 927-9.

“Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Function in the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven by William E. Caplin” Indiana Theory Review 20/2 (1999): 41-56.

“Schoenberg, Webern, Berg: A Companion to the Second Viennese School edited by Bryan Simms,” Notes 57/2 (2000): 301-2.

JOURNALISM:

“CMS Initiatives in Music Theory,” Newsletter of the College Music Society, November 2002.

“The Music of Otto Luening," Program Notes, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D. C., November 1987.

“Otto Luening, Barnard and Electronic Music," Barnard Alumnae Magazine (1988): 4-8.

“The Music of Robert Savage,” New York: Composer Recordings, Inc., CD 790, (1999), booklet, 1-5.

“Interview: Severine Neff on Composer Arnold Schoenberg,” [in Russian] by Natalia Wlassova, Musica Academica 2 (2000): 140-5.

RECENT COURSES:

Undergraduate:

Diatonic Harmony, Chromatic Harmony, Eighteenth-Century Counterpoint, Twentieth-Century Techniques; Freshman Seminar on Visual Art and Music in the Twentieth Century

Graduate:

The Musical Theories of Arnold Schoenberg; Twentieth-Century Theories of Tonal Music; Twentieth-Century Theory and Composition: A Symbiotic Relation?; Arnold Schoenberg and Tonal Counterpoint; Twentieth-Century Analysis: Schoenberg, Ives, Rochberg, Carter; Fifty Years of American Music Theory (1955-2005); Communities of Composers in Western Europe and America (1900-50)