Sunderman Conservatory of Music

Dr. William O’Hara is a music theorist and historian with active research interests in tonal analysis, chromatic harmony, the history of music theory, public music theory, and music in contemporary media. Currently, he is at work monograph about the the music of American composer Amy Beach, and the place of video game music studies in the academy. O’Hara earned his PhD at Harvard University, where he was also a fellow at Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. He previously taught music theory at Tufts University, and led workshops on filmmaking, editing, and podcasting at the Bok Center.

O’Hara has presented papers at meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Analysis (UK), the North American Conference on Video Game Music, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, KeystoneDH, and various regional conferences. Internationally, he has delivered talks or panels at Oxford University, the University of Liverpool, Royal Holloway University of London, the Royal Conservatory (The Hague), and the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg.

In 2020, O’Hara’s article on the cultural politics of online music analysis received the Adam Krims Award (outstanding article by a junior scholar) from the Society for Music Theory’s Popular Music Interest Group. His writings have appeared in journals such as Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online, Music Analysis, Music Theory & Analysis, Theory & Practice, the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, along with collections such as The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Music in Games. Forthcoming writings will appear in the Journal of Music Theory,SMT-V, Engaging Students, and The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory.

O’Hara is Associate Editor of Music Theory Online, and web editor for the online scholarly video journal SMT-V. He is the vice president of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic and co-chair of SMT’s History of Music Theory study group, and has previously served as an editorial assistant for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, a member of SMT’s IT/Networking Committee, and co-chair of SMT’s Film & Multimedia Interest Group.