Alfred Cramer

Alfred Cramer is a scholar of music theory whose multi-disciplinary work connects to fields as diverse as psychology, linguistics, and history while drawing on his own considerable experience as a musical performer. As a researcher, he is interested in the mechanisms (both cultural and cognitive) through which music communicates its meanings. This has led him to study and teach about sound as a cultural artifact and a medium of communication.

He is at work on a book about music composed in the years before World War I by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg, drawing on early twentieth-century psychological ideas to explain how these highly influential modernist composers, often regarded as mathematical and unemotional, actually worked to make their music as directly expressive as possible.

In his most recent work, Cramer studies the ways sound is used to structure information in spoken language and in music; to state it technically, he is attempting to unify the Implication-Realization model of musical melody with the Autosegmental-Metrical approach to linguistic intonation.  The project incorporates music ranging from Telemann to “This Land is Your Land.” In an earlier study, he investigated 19th-century music in relation to 19th-century handwriting and stenography, exploring ways in which sound was conceptualized before the phonograph.