About

Marc Hannaford is a music theorist and assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. His research interests lie at the intersection of jazz and improvisation, identity—particularly race, gender, and disability—and performance. He has been recognized with the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award in 2023 for his article on George Russell’s Theory of Tonality and received the University of Michigan’s Henry Russel Award in 2025, the institution's highest honor for early- and mid-career scholars. Hannaford completed his PhD at Columbia University in 2019, with a dissertation focused on Muhal Richard Abrams, a prominent pianist, composer, and cofounder of the AACM. His scholarly work has been published in several notable journals, and he is engaged in a book project examining the genealogy of music theory developed by African American musicians in the twentieth century. As an educator, he helps students develop personal engagements with music through critical exploration of various approaches, including theoretical, analytical, historical, and creative. Additionally, Hannaford is an improvising pianist, composer, and electronic musician who has performed and recorded with renowned artists such as Tim Berne, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, Tony Malaby, and William Parker. Originally from Australia, he discovered academic music theory through performance and conservatory training as a jazz pianist, and he maintains secondary research interests in contemporary composition, rhythmic complexity, and improvisation.

Research topics

• Art
• Art history
• Sociology
• Epistemology
• Visual arts
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Affordances and Free Improvisation

  2026-02-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter proposes an analytical framework for the analysis of interaction in free improvisation. This framework attends to interaction’s more multivalent forms in free improvisation compared to “straight-ahead” jazz, although it makes space for conventions and style-based interactive relationships. The concept of affordances underlies the analytic framework. The chapter draws on work in ecological psychology, anthropology, and sociology, in addition to music theory and musicology, to deploy affordances as a metaphor to analyze how musicians “use” sounds in their sonic environment in their interactions. An analysis of a duo improvisation by Muhal Richard Abrams and Fred Anderson demonstrates the framework.

  PublisherDOI

• Eric Dolphy’s and Yusef Lateef’s Synthetic Formations

  Music Theory Online · 2025-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article focuses on a "synthetic scale" reproduced in Yusef Lateef's Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns and attributed to Eric Dolphy.Linking music theory, jazz studies, and Black performance theory, I deploy archival research and meta-theoretical analysis to discuss the various music-theoretical, creative, social, and political resonances of this entry.The article positions Dolphy's scale and Lateef's engagement with it as a testament to the communal "Black study" of 1960s jazz, implicates music theory in contemporaneous issues regarding racial politics, and explores how music theory informs creative practice in these musicians' work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adventures in Tonal Gravity: George Russell’s Analysis of Maurice Ravel’s “Forlane”

  Music Theory Spectrum · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Art
  • Art history

  Abstract George Russell conceptualized his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization as a theory of tonality. He includes an analysis of the opening of Maurice Ravel’s “Forlane” from Le Tombeau de Couperin in the fourth and final edition of his text to demonstrate what his theory—“The Concept”—offers for the analysis of Western art music. This article takes Russell’s claim seriously, discusses The Concept as a theory of tonality, and extends Russell’s analysis to the entirety of “Forlane.” I also connect Russell’s work to broader Black cultural practices and their socio-political resonances.

  PublisherDOI

• Theory on the South Side: Muhal Richard Abrams's Engagement with Joseph Schillinger's <i>System of Musical Composition</i>

  Journal of the Society for American Music · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Visual arts

  Abstract Muhal Richard Abrams's ground-breaking work as a composer, improviser, and cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is far reaching and multifaceted. Russian composer, theorist, and polymath Joseph Schillinger appears repeatedly in discussions of Abrams and the AACM, suggesting that music theory played a generative role in Abrams's creative practice and pedagogy. This article focuses on Abrams's engagement with The Schillinger System of Musical Composition . It theorizes Abrams's incorporation of Schillinger's work into his broader creative pallette, analyzes Abrams's compositional application of Schillinger's theory, and suggests conceptual resonances between Abrams's creative practice and the text. Ultimately, this article suggests a larger network of African American theorists, which I conceptualize as “fugitive music theory.”

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On the Inside

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-02-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter explores instances of musical notation in liner notes to jazz long-playing records as sites of music theoretical import. Transcriptions, scores, and lead sheets encourage readers/listeners to engage in music analysis in order to gain insight into the recorded music and underlying musical processes. These liner notes represent public-facing prompts for music analysis that exist outside of both academic music theoretical mediums and more conventional public forums. Four case studies—from albums by Jim Hall, Andrew Hill, Charlie Haden and Hampton Hawes, and Ornette Coleman—are preceded by historical and materialist discussions. This chapter is also informed by insights from John Snyder, producer or creative director for these releases. Ultimately, this discussion suggests an expanded view as to what counts as music theory.

  PublisherDOI

• Review of Leslie A. Tilley, <i>Making It Up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond</i> (The University of Chicago Press, 2019)

  Music Theory Online · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  • Visual arts

  Improvisation is a ubiquitous component of music the world over. Scholars have detailed some of its multifarious forms and meanings, demonstrating that the practice of improvisation extends far beyond its hypervisibility in jazz. (1) Tilley's Making It Up Together offers new and compelling perspectives in this expanding field of improvisation studies, as well as in ethnomusicology (Tilley's home discipline) and music theory. It excavates improvisatory processes in a musical genre thought to be largely composed and offers a unique examination of intraensemble interaction. The book also proposes a new theory of improvisation applicable to practices beyond the book's specific case studies, and its discussion of "local theory" suggests that we critically expand the theoretical underpinnings of our disciplines.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• One Line, Many Views: Perspectives on Music Theory, Composition, and Improvisation through the Work of Muhal Richard Abrams

  2019-01-01 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This dissertation examines aspects of the creative practice of Muhal Richard Abrams, composer, improviser, pianist, and cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Abrams’s work intersects with various facets of creative music. I focus on free improvisation, both as a stand-alone performance and in conjunction with through composed music, his engagement with writings by theorist Joseph Schillinger, and his work as a composer. This study provides an historical overview of Abrams’s life and output, supplies analytical accounts of his music and creative practice, contributes to critical issues in music theory and analysis through these examinations, and diversifies the music, musicians, and topics that comprise the discipline of music theory. My examinations position Abrams as an important figure in twentieth century music, both improvised and composed, and expand studies in music theory and analysis. I offer new perspectives on and a framework for the analysis of free improvisation and intra-ensemble interaction, challenge traditional binaries between music theory and black experimental music, explore the influence of Schillinger’s theoretical treatise, The Schillinger System of Musical Composition ([1946] 1978), on Abrams’s work as a composer, explicate a set of idiosyncratic theoretical publications to suggest an underground genealogy of music theory, and posit an analytical vista that sits at the intersection of music performance, disability, and critical race studies. My overview of Abrams’s life and work draws on historical scholarship to tease out details of his development and practice in Chicago and New York, and analyzes contemporaneous articles from magazines, newspapers, and journals in order to provide a snapshot of the reception of Abrams’s work and the various scenes that he traversed. In response to Abrams’s individual approach to interactive free improvisation, which functions as either a stand-alone performance or alongside composed music, I employ the concept of affordances from ecological psychology. My affordance based analytical framework facilities a reappraisal of musicians’ interactions during free improvisation and also theorizes the relationship that emerges when free improvisation is preceded and/or followed by composed material. I analyze Abrams’s improvised duet with Fred Anderson, “Focus, ThruTime…Time—&gt;” (2011) and his quartet rendition of “Munktmunk” (1987) to illustrate my framework and elucidate the richness of these performances. I perform a close reading of Schillinger’s theoretical treatise to suggest resonances between Abrams’s creative practice and the text. I do not aim to elect Schillinger as a kind of fountainhead for Abrams’s practice. Rather, I argue that the numerous resonances between Schillinger’s text and Abrams’s practice connote reasons why the treatise strongly appealed to Abrams, such that he employed it both compositionally and pedagogically for a large portion of his life. I extrapolate from this discussion to outline and theorize an underground genealogy of music theory that represents a more diverse set of music theoretical practices than is often discussed in the discipline. Finally, I analyze composed portions of four works by Abrams: “Inner Lights” (1985), “Charlie in the Parker” (1977), “Hearinga” (1989), and “Piano Duet #1” (1987). My analyses of the first three of these pieces intimate the presence of some of Schillinger’s theoretical principles. Abrams does not simply realize Schillinger’s theoretical method in his work, but rather maintains artistic agency by selectively filtering those suggestions through his own pluralistic aesthetic. Finally, I combine recent work on disability in music and critical race theory to analyze “Piano Duet #1,” in which the two pianists’ bodies are restricted in performance. This analysis offers a generative reappraisal of music performance and disability studies in light of race while also elucidating some of the richness of Abrams’s composition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity ed. by Gillian Siddall, Ellen Waterman

  Women & music · 2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity ed. by Gillian Siddall, Ellen Waterman Marc Hannaford (bio) Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity. Edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 376pp. Negotiated Moments frames improvisation as a practice that is both potentially emancipatory and full of risk, simultaneously embodied and theoretical, and as a means of resisting oppressive power structures through musical and nonmusical sound. The chapters engage with critical studies in both improvisation and identity, and contributing authors explore subjectivity as an intersectional and dynamic [End Page 202] space: gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, nationhood, and class interact in complex ways throughout the volume. Their methodologies and frameworks include ethnography and autoethnography, phenomenology, interviews, and a variety of modes of analysis. The themes covered in Negotiated Moments reflect the scope of contemporary critical improvisation studies and its congruence with critical identity studies. The collection is not the first publication to consider both improvisation and identity: scholars such as Lisa Barg, George Lewis, Julie Dawn Smith, Yoko Suzuki, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, and Ellen Waterman have published influential pieces on improvised music and identity.1 Yet one of the distinguishing features of critical improvisation studies is that it is not exclusively concerned with jazz or even with music. A recent two-volume set, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, for example, contains theorizations of improvisation across a widely varied set of practices, including farming in Sierra Leone, yoga, and poetry.2 Negotiated Moments similarly uncouples improvisation and jazz and examines a variety of improvised practices. Negotiated Moments is the most recent publication from the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) series, a product of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The goal for this series is to “advocate musical improvisation as a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action.”3 This goal resonates with work in critical identity studies by scholars like Suzanne Cusick, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Jack Halberstam: although these scholars are not usually associated with improvisation, their work often focuses on locating individual and collective agency, finding alternate solutions to [End Page 203] recurrent problems, developing and participating in communities, and negotiating difference in the face of oppressive structural or theoretical paradigms.4 The influence of critical identity studies on Negotiated Moments is most apparent in the contributors’ attention to intersectionality and multidirectional flows of power, as well as in their avoidance of idealistic conceptions of improvisation as automatically emancipatory. Improvisation, editors Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman argue, does not guarantee the upset or transformation of oppressive paradigms (3). Instead, improvisation “makes negotiations . . . of subjectivity audible” (3). Such audible negotiations suggest a practice of being in the world that looks past one’s immediate surroundings toward a broad range of cultural, social, artistic, and intellectual issues and viewpoints. The emancipatory power of improvisation thus lies in its ability to initiate audible exchanges across boundaries of difference, although how each exchange unfolds is contingent on both the individuals involved and the surrounding aesthetic, musical, and social structures. Deborah Wong’s chapter, for example, demonstrates that improvisation in taiko drumming can be a means of both doubling down on stereotypes and emancipating oneself from them, depending on how it is employed and framed. Rebecca Caines discusses her new-media audio art project, Community Sound [e]Scapes, in similar terms. She reveals that participants’ unexpected modes of engaging with her project brought out issues of power, economic disparity, ability, age, and other factors that she might not have otherwise considered. A breakdown in communication in her project led to instances in which “dominant bodies spoke in place of those who might improvise their ‘community’ and their sites, space, and places a little differently” (69). Despite the many differences between Wong’s and Caines’s chapters, both demonstrate that improvisation remains high risk— that making space for exchange between subjectivities can reveal theoretical and methodological blind spots. Chapter 2 presents an interview between Tracy McMullen and Judith Butler. McMullen and Butler disagree about whether subjects can purposively lift themselves out of repressive paradigms. For Butler, every repetition includes potential for newness and difference, irrespective of intention. Newness therefore cannot be...

  PublisherDOI

• Subjective (Re)positioning in Musical Improvisation

  Music Theory Online · 2017-06-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article analyzes the music of five female improvisers. I employ these women’s lived experiences of discrimination as a basis for my analysis of improvisation in terms of what I call subjective (re)positioning. Given these women’s experiences of discrimination, trust means something far richer than musically working together during performance. Trusting improvising partners create a conceptual space in which musicians are able to position and reposition themselves, thus expressing agency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Elliott Carter's rhythmic language: a framework for improvisation

  Minerva Access (University of Melbourne) · 2011-01-01

  dissertation1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• J. McLean

  1 shared

• Paul Williamson

  Monash University

  1 shared

• Sam Zerna

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Society for Music Theory Emerging Scholar Award (2023)
• Henry Russel Award (2025)