Dr. PHEAROSS GRAHAM
musicologist | pianist
Dr. Pheaross Graham (\fur-AHS\) is a musicologist and classical pianist. He recently completed a three-year appointment as both a Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Lecturer in Musicology at the Stanford Music Department, selected as one of four from a pool of about 800 applicants. His research, situated at the intersection of theory and practice, unites artists’ idealist subject positions with close sonic and physical readings of recorded performances. Broadly speaking, his research offers new approaches to performance analysis, focusing on Western art and selected vernacular music from the nineteenth century onward. He focuses on pianists of the recording era (since the twentieth century). His current projects meditate intertextually on the recordings of the African American pianist-composer Don Shirley and Russian pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.
His current book project, I Am Not an Entertainer: Don Shirley, Green Book Pianism, and the Middlebrow Problem, addresses a Black artistic experience in the long 1960s. It examines how Don Shirley—subject of the 2018 film Green Book—consciously stimulated engaged listening, pushing against the grain of racialized entertainment in the U.S. He argues that Shirley connected seemingly politically disengaged “nightclub” music to the Civil Rights Movement while working to musically challenge otherwise discriminating audiences. Drawing upon an archive he continues to assemble and recent fieldwork he conducted in Jamaica, his work theorizes a “Black middle ground,” an artistic space that performers forged to thrive on their own terms.
He has also begun work toward a second project, The Equal-Tempered Piano: Virtuosity, Popularity, and the Global Making of the Sonic Self. In it, he examines how the piano acts as a transnational medium for negotiating exile, race, and selfhood across intersecting popular and classical spheres.
Dr. Graham has presented his work nationally and internationally at conferences, including three times at the prestigious Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, the Music and the Moving Image conference (NYU), AMS Pre-Conference Symposium (Beyond Contrafacts), the Institute for Russian Music Studies, and elsewhere. He also presented his work at invited colloquia, including the Berkeley Music Studies Colloquium Series, Indiana University's Musicology Colloquium Series, Ithaca College, The Open University (London), Stanford's Ron Alexander Memorial Lecture Series in Musicology, the Stanford Humanities Center, and Stanford's Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities. He was a co-organizer and scholar-pianist at the UCLA Music Performance Studies Today Conference. At LA Opera, he served as a Teaching Artist and affiliated scholar.
He is a dedicated teacher, having completed 30 terms of university teaching. His classroom experience includes everything from Western concert music and opera to EDM, musicals, rock music, performers’ musicology, applied piano, 1960s American music, and writing about music. His work as a researcher for UCLA’s Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms program aided him in designing and teaching new courses at Stanford (Reading Recorded Performances, Theorizing Blackness in Film and Music, 19th-Century Pianism), as well as updating their major’s core course, Music History Since 1830, which he taught three times.
Dr. Graham has 15 years of experience teaching piano privately and uniquely draws on his expertise as a musicologist, emphasizing humanistic interpretation studies. His technical pedagogy, greatly influenced by the Taubman Approach, emphasizes the biomechanics of coordinated motion, prizing efficient, healthy, and sustainable virtuosity.
Dr. Graham earned six degrees, including his Ph.D., C.Phil., and M.A. in musicology at UCLA, M.F.A. in piano performance from UC Irvine (followed by three further years of graduate piano study at UCLA), and B.A. in music and B.S. in microbial biology from UC Berkeley. Important formative experiences included studies at the Aspen Music Festival and School and Tanglewood Institute. He received two Dean's medals from UCLA (for teaching and general distinction), the UCLA Musicology Departmental Distinguished Teaching Award, the Cota-Robles Fellowship, and the Arts Initiative Award, among many other honors. At UCLA, he was one of two nominees selected campuswide from ~400 doctoral graduates as a Doctoral Hooding Speaker and was honored with a gold fourragère.
CV provided upon request.