Sam Reenan
Education
Ph.D. Music Theory, Eastman
MA Music Theory, Eastman
BM Music Theory, University of Connecticut
BS Biological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Sam Reenan joined the faculty at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, as Assistant Professor of Music Theory in Fall 2021. He previously served as Lecturer in Music at Hamilton College.
Reenan is a dedicated educator and serves as the coordinator of the music theory area. He teaches a variety of undergraduate courses across all stages of the music theory curriculum. He also teaches graduate students in Miami's innovative MM degree program, where he has advised several graduate research projects. A proponent of the teacher-scholar model, Reenan has been a participant in programs including the Advancing Teacher Scholars faculty learning community (2023–2024), the Howe Faculty Fellows program (Spring 2023), and the New Faculty Teaching Enhancement Program (Fall 2021).
Issues of symphonic thought, generic mixture, large-scale form, and narrative figure prominently in Dr. Reenan’s research program. His principal research project, provisionally titled Structure and Spectacle: Form and Genre in the Hybrid Twentieth Century Symphony, examines these issues across a range of Germanic, American, and British symphonic works. His writings are published or forthcoming in Music Theory Online, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and Music & Letters, while his dissertation focuses on the music of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Arnold Schoenberg. Dr. Reenan has presented spoken papers at international, national, and regional conferences on a range of topics including theoretical approaches to sonata form in Mahler’s late symphonies and Strauss’s tone poems; pitch, memory, and timbre in Henri Dutilleux’s music; T. W. Adorno’s analytical aesthetics; graduate instructor peer observation; and commercial jingles. His 2020 presentation at the Music Theory Southeast conference, titled “The ‘Rondo’ and the ‘Burleske’ in Mahler’s Rondo-Burleske,” was awarded the Irna Priore Prize for Graduate Student Research.
Reenan is a co-organizer of the Composers of Color Resource Project and has been a reader for the AP Music Theory exam. He serves on Miami's University Senate as well as the Education Committee at the Society for American Music, and he is the current web manager at the Music Theory Society of New York State. Formerly, Reenan was an editorial assistant with Music Theory Online from 2017–2021, and he is a past co-editor of Intégral, where he led the journal’s transition to an online, open-access format.
Reenan holds an MA and PhD in music theory from the Eastman School of Music and bachelor’s degrees in music theory and biological sciences from the University of Connecticut.