José António Martins
Assistant Professor
Theory
Phone: (319) 353-2181
Office: 1019 VMB
jose-martins@uiowa.edu

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José António Martins

Research interests: modeling of musical systems, diatonicism and chromaticism especially the relations between medieval theory and twentieth-century polymodality; the music of Bartók, Falla, Kúrtag, Lutoslawski, and Schnittke; declamation and musical structure in Portuguese Fado songs.

José António Martins has degrees in music theory and violin performance from Escola Superior de Música do Porto, Portugal (B. M., 1992), Northwestern University, (M.M., 1996), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 2006). Before joining the faculty at The University of Iowa, he was Professor Adjunto at Escola Superior de Artes Aplicadas in Castelo Branco, Portugal, and lectured at Lake Forest College and at the University of Chicago.

Martins’s dissertation “Dasian, Guidonian, and Affinity Spaces in Twentieth-Century Music” examines the compositional practice of combining strands that appear to invoke different diatonic scales in the music of Bartók, Stravinsky, and Milhaud. Generalizing medieval scale structures and practices, it proposes two conceptual extended scalar spaces (Dasian and Guidonian) that dispense with the mediating role of complete diatonic scales and pitch centers, while accounting for harmonic relations and syntax. The structure of these spaces is generalized (Affinity spaces) in order to address other twentieth-century pitch configurations.

Martins spoke at a number of conferences and Universities including the Society for Music Theory; Music Theory Midwest; Music Theory Society of New York State; Dublin International Conference of Music Analysis; Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Indiana University; University of Cincinnati; University of Washington; Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain; Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espectáculo, Porto, Portugal, and Institute of Musicology at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland.

Martins published in Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, and his paper “Stravinsky Discontinuities, Harmonic Practice, and the Guidonian Space in the 'Hymne' of the Serenade in A” is forthcoming in Theory and Practice. He was the 2004 recipient of the Arthur J. Komar Award (Music Theory Midwest), and the Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award (Music Theory Society of New York State). He has been a fellow at John Clough Memorial Symposium (Chicago, 2005) and the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory (Yale, 2006).

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Last updated 21-aug-06