Research
CV (updated March 2025)
As a scholar, Jacob Reed studies the intertwined nature of words and music in a variety of times, places, and repertoires. His dissertation project, “Negotiating Grammars: Encounters Between Music and Text” combines tools from music theory and phonology to examine how lyrics and music fight, replace, and compensate for each other; case studies include recent American pop and hip-hop, Chinese Kunqu opera, and K-pop. Other recent and ongoing projects have explored the interaction of music, language, and aesthetics in Early and Middle Period Chinese literary thought; German Idealist anthropology and musical thought; jazz literature as criticism; and (with Chris Batterman Cháirez) music in the history of anthropology.
While at Yale, Jacob received a simultaneous BA/MA in music history and theory, while double-majoring in mathematics. He is now a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he won the 2023 Cathy Heifetz Memorial Award and teaches both music theory/ear training and keyboard performance.
Links above to:
2025. “Kant, Coleridge, and the “Moonlight” Sonata: Imagination, Fantasy, and Fantasies in Beethoven’s Time.” 19th-Century Music 48 (3).
2023. “Text-Setting Tradeoffs in English-Language Popular Music: Incorporating Musical Constraints into OT Analysis.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society 58.
This is only the sketch of an analysis, and I’m now less convinced that a full, strict Optimality Theory implementation is actually feasible. (This applies to previous attempts at OT-based textsetting as well.) Looser (“OT-style”/preference rules-based) approaches to this data can be found in the second and third chapters of my dissertation.
2020. “Review of Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies.” Current Musicology 107.