About

Nathan Martin is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, where he joined the faculty in 2015. His primary research interests include the history of music theory and the analysis of musical form. His work has concentrated on the theoretical writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau and their early French reception, especially among philosophes such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Martin approaches the history of music theory as both a branch of intellectual history and through practical engagements with historically informed analysis, style-bound improvisation, and model composition. He aims to bring both etic and emic perspectives to his studies, exploring the relationships between music-theoretical systems and their cultural contexts, as well as engaging with the conceptual resources they provide. His research on musical form involves analytical studies of specific works, critical engagement with the 'new Formenlehre,' and theorizing form in vocal music. Recently, he has become interested in applying empirical methods from social sciences and linguistics to investigate questions of musical form. Martin has held postdoctoral fellowships and teaching positions at Columbia, Harvard, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and Yale. He earned his PhD from McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in 2009 and has published extensively on topics related to music theory, including the theoretical writings of Rameau, Rousseau, and others, as well as on the analysis of musical form.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Epistemology
• Political Science
• Humanities
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Art
• History
• Art history
• Clinical psychology
• Law
• Archaeology
• Developmental psychology
• Demography
• Linguistics
• Social psychology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Affective schemas: Acquisition, updating, and inference.

  Emotion · 2025-07-14 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Schematized knowledge structures have been extensively studied in the cognitive domain, and yet the nature of affective schemas remains an uncharted area, with experimental work virtually nonexistent. Here, we examined how affective schemas are acquired, updated, and used for inference-making using three novel experimental paradigms. We show that affective schemas emerge by abstracting a common affective value from a distribution of unique affective associations. This common abstracted affective value semanticizes from the discrete exemplars into complex, valenced schemas (negative, positive, neutral), which consolidates across a 24-hr period. Valenced schemas (negative/positive) form faster than neutral schemas, resist affective reversals more strongly, and facilitate rapid learning and memory for related emotional information. Negative-valenced schemas, in particular, are most prioritized for learning, show greater resilience to change, and are more effective in supporting generalized (gist-based) inferences. This work defines key features of affective schemas, moving the study of emotional learning and memory systems from the conditioning of specific associations to the abstraction and consolidation of complex emotional knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Musik/musique

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Commentary

  Music Theory Online · 2024-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I was reminded, in reading the opening chapters of Li Tsing-chu's in Edwin K. C. Li's elegant English translation, of my experience, in the late spring and early summer of 2018, of visiting Hong Kong for the first time-how that city's built environment, natural setting, mixture of cultures, babel of languages, range of foods, and so on could seem (to someone born and partly raised on the west coast of Canada-not irrelevantly, in this context, another former British colony) at once profoundly familiar and exceedingly strange.Li Tsing-chu's book is, among other things, a call-if not, perhaps, entirely to abandon received Chinese ways of conceptualizing music, then at least to supplement these with ideas borrowed from "the West" (), by which he essentially means Germany, where he lived and studied between 1911 and 1922.So for a reader like me, whose grounding in academic musicology was still largely shaped by these same Germanic traditions, a striking feature of the text is how it reflects familiar tropes and themes back through the glass of a very different intellectual sensibility.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Corpus Studies and ‘Close Listening’

  Music Analysis · 2024-07-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This article provides a detailed response to Markus Neuwirth and Martin Rohrmeier's article ‘Wie wissenschaftlich muss Musiktheorie sein?’, published in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie in 2016. I undertake to nuance their call for the wholesale adoption of machine‐assisted corpus‐based methods in music theory through a detailed appreciation of work‐specific analysis as is has been practiced in American music theory. The argument unfolds through three case studies: of David Lewin's 1982 analysis of Schubert's ‘Auf dem Flusse’; of Vasili Byros's more recent approach to the Eroica Symphony; and then of Lewin again, on Schubert's ‘Morgengruß’. By means of these examples, I probe where corpus‐based methods can enhance traditional approaches and what new avenues of research they make possible, but I also emphasise those aspects of work‐specific analysis that elude their grasp.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interpersonal early adversity demonstrates dissimilarity from early socioeconomic disadvantage in the course of human brain development: A meta-analysis

  Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · 2023 · 38 citations

  • Psychology
  • Developmental psychology
  • Clinical psychology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interpersonal early adversity demonstrates dissimilarity from early socioeconomic disadvantage in the course of human brain development: A meta-analysis

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2023-02-18 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  It has been established that early-life adversity impacts brain development, but the role of development itself has largely been ignored. We take a developmentally-sensitive approach to examine the neurodevelopmental sequelae of early adversity in a preregistered meta-analysis of 27,234 youth (birth to 18-years-old), providing the largest group of adversity-exposed youth to date. Findings demonstrate that early-life adversity does not have an ontogenetically uniform impact on brain volumes, but instead exhibits age-, experience-, and region-specific associations. Relative to non-exposed comparisons, interpersonal early adversity (e.g., family-based maltreatment) was associated with initially larger volumes in frontolimbic regions until ~10-years-old, after which these exposures were linked to increasingly smaller volumes. By contrast, socioeconomic disadvantage (e.g., poverty) was associated with smaller volumes in temporal-limbic regions in childhood, which were attenuated at older ages. These findings advance ongoing debates regarding why, when, and how early-life adversity shapes later neural outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Models for Mozart’s Transitions: A Transatlantic Exchange

  Music Theory Spectrum · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Epistemology

  Abstract This research note comprises two interlinked texts. The first is a short essay that, developing ideas from Ulrich Kaiser’s (2009) article on Mozart’s transitions, isolates and theorizes a particular transition pattern (the “Prinner transition”) and then illustrates with a series of analyses. The second is a response from Kaiser clarifying the difference between Gjerdingen’s Prinner and his own 4^−1^ (fa–ut) model. The immediate theoretical issues in play involve the relationship between schema theory, formal functions, and voice-leading reduction as well as differences between Anglo-American and Germanic understandings of schemata and models.

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a “Global” History of Music Theory

  Journal of Music Theory · 2022-09-08 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The history of music theory, as it has usually been taught in the United States, has focused on a small canon of texts written mostly in Latin, Italian, French, and German. This article advocates a more expansive view of the subdiscipline's remit by way of three case studies. The first considers the distinction that Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Fārābī draws between the speculative and active parts of music theory and its influence on the formation of the discipline in the Latin-speaking world. The second considers entanglement between French and Chinese music theorizing in the later eighteenth century. The third treats the international contexts of Hugo Riemann's thought. I present these three case studies, together with more general reflections on the possible scope of research on historical music theory, with the aim of inviting reflection on the subdiscipline's past, present, and future.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis</i> Thomas Christensen

  Music and Letters · 2021-09-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As a music theorist, François-Joseph Fétis has never quite received his due. The reasons, no doubt, are complex: the reflexive Teutonocentrism of those university music departments where the history of music theory has been most cultivated—in Germany (understandably) and in the United States (less so)—the gradual decline, outside of the Francophonie, in French-language reading ability generally, as well as the very profusion and prolixity of Fétis’s own literary production. But a significant factor has surely also been Fétis’s overt and enthusiastic racism, which becomes explicitly entangled with his music theorizing—above all, with his conception of ‘tonality’ and especially in the Histoire générale de la musique (1869–76). Fétis’s copy of Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853) is amongst the most heavily annotated items in his personal library, which is preserved in the exemplar Fétis 327 RP held at the KBR (Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Bibliothèque Royale, known informally as...

  PublisherDOI

• ROUSSEAU'S <i>AIR CHINOIS</i>

  Eighteenth Century Music · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Political Science
  • Philosophy

  ABSTRACT Among its various ancient and extra-European examples, the celebrated Plate N of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique includes a melody of Chinese provenance. Scholars have proposed three possible sources for the melody: Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde and the Abbé Prévost. By synthesizing the known sources and introducing additional archival evidence I establish that Rousseau took the melody from Du Halde, not Prévost – and definitely not Amiot. Along the way, I provide an account of Amiot's extant manuscripts and their circulation in Enlightenment Paris. These details begin to suggest the broader panorama of the French Enlightenment's encounter with China and the networks of trade, diplomacy and proselytization that facilitated it.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Steven Vande Moortele

  3 shared

• Anna Vannucci

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• John Kerwin

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Eleanor Hansen

  2 shared

• Nim Tottenham

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Andrea Fields

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Ayumi Tachida

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Ariel Katz

  Columbia University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Society for Music Theory’s Outstanding Publication Award (20…