Michael Dodds
Phone: (336) 770-3258
Email: doddsm@ncarts.edu

Michael Dodds, Ph.D. joins our full-time faculty in Fall of 2005 to teach music history and literature.

A faculty member at Southern Methodist University since 1997, Michael Dodds earned his Ph.D. at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. With support from a Fulbright Research Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he spent the academic year 2002-03 in Florence, Italy, researching and writing a book on modal theory in the Baroque era.

His recent conference papers and articles have explored topics including performance practices at Florence's cathedral in the 17th century; shifting conceptualizations of tonal space in 17th century music theory; instructions for organists in Baroque plainchant manuals; implicit epistemologies in modal theory; the nature of the relationship between the Phrygian mode and E minor in Baroque music; fugal improvisation in the North German Baroque; competing systems of modal thought in the Baroque; and transposition practices in alternatim psalmody in the seventeenth century. Some of his other research interests include music in colonial Latin America and the relationship between world view and the history of music theory.

Dr. Dodds spent most of his childhood in the eastern rainforest of Peru, where his parents were serving as medical missionaries. At the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music in Wheaton, Ill., he majored in Violin Performance and served as concertmaster of the college orchestra for two years, graduating in 1987. Following a year spent in further violin study and working in Washington, D.C. for Congress and for a federal agency, he spent a year in Vienna, Austria, working for the United Nations. He is married to Jane Dodds, a portrait artist. They have five children.