Adjunct Professor of Music History
BA, Loyola University, Chicago
MSt, Oxford University
PhD, University of North Texas
Robert Michael Anderson is an adjunct professor of Music History at the University of North Texas. He completed his Ph.D. in Musicology and Minor in German Studies at the University of North Texas in 2022. He also holds a Master of Studies in musicology from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Arts in music from Loyola University Chicago, with further studies at the University of Vienna. His dissertation, “Ideal Hausmusik: Brahms’s Vocal Quartets (Opp. 31, 52, 64, 65, 92, 103, and 112) and the Politics of Domestic Music ca. 1848-1900,” recovers a largely forgotten discourse about domestic music-making and national identity that flourished in German-speaking Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and demonstrates how it influenced the conception and reception of Brahms’s vocal quartets during the same period. This research has been supported by the Karl Geiringer Scholarship from the American Brahms Society and an Ernst Mach Worldwide Grant from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. Other areas of interest include the aesthetics of Absolute Music, music and Romantic German literature, and, more broadly, how musical genres and styles generate historically and culturally specific meanings. He has published articles in the American Brahms Society Newsletter and the Musical Times and presented at national and international conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Austrian Studies Association, and both the North American and Biennial International Conferences on Nineteenth-Century Music. At UNT, he teaches undergraduate music electives for majors and nonmajors and musicology courses for graduate students in the College of Music.