Jonathan De Souza
Office: TC 117
Phone: (519) 661-2111 x85198
Email: jdesou22@uwo.ca
Jonathan De Souza is an Associate Professor of Music Theory. He is also the Director of Western’s Graduate Collaborative Specialization in Music Cognition.
De Souza’s research combines music theory, psychology, and philosophy, and it examines both classical and popular repertoire. He is particularly interested in music, performance, and embodiment. For example, his book, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, asks how instruments affect music’s sounding organization and players’ experience. In 2020, Music at Hand won the Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Society for Music Theory, and he received a Faculty Scholar Award recognizing significant achievements in research.
De Souza often collaborates across disciplines. He is an Associate Member of Western’s Centre for Brain and Mind and a Core Member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism.
At Western, De Souza teaches a range of undergraduate theory courses. Recent graduate courses have explored music cognition, the history of music theory and science, and music theory pedagogy.
De Souza holds a PhD in music theory and history from the University of Chicago, an MMus from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a BMus from Western University. He joined the faculty at Western in 2013.
Representative publications:
- “Music, Mind, Body, and World.” In The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past, Imagining the Future, edited by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Psyche Loui, and Deirdre Loughridge, 135–59. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.
- “Melodic Transformation in George Garzone’s Triadic Chromatic Approach; or, Jazz, Math, and Basket Weaving.” Music Theory Spectrum 44, no. 2 (2022): 213–30 (winner of the SMT Jazz Interest Group’s Award for Excellence in Jazz Scholarship, 2023).
- “Classical Rondos and Sonatas as Stylistic Categories” (with Adam Roy and Andrew Goldman). Music Perception 37, no. 5 (2020): 373–91.
- “Fretboard Transformations.” Journal of Music Theory 62, no. 1 (2018): 1–39.
- Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 (winner of the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Book Award, 2020).
For more information, see https://works.bepress.com/jonathan-desouza/.
