Ian Quinn

Ian Quinn is the Allen Forte Professor of Music Theory and Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) at Yale University, within the Department of Music in the College of Arts and Science. He holds a B.A. from Columbia University (1993), M.A. and Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music (1998, 2004). Prior to Yale, he taught at the University of Chicago and University of Oregon, and was a CASBS Residential Fellow at Stanford (2008-09).

His research focuses on tonal harmony, corpus studies, music cognition, and the intersections of mathematics and computation in music theory. He edited the Journal of Music Theory (2004–2011) and co-organized the 2009 Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music conference. He leads the Yale-New Haven Regular Singing (YNHRS) shape-note singing group and serves on editorial boards for Journal of Mathematics and Music and the Northeast Music Cognition Group (NEMCOG).

Quinn’s work has earned awards from the Society for Music Theory, including the Emerging Scholar Award (2004) and Outstanding Publication Award (2006/2007). His research spans analytical frameworks for harmonic function, corpus-based studies of tonal systems, and empirical investigations of music perception. He has advised over 15 doctoral students, many now in academic and industry roles.

Key collaborations include co-authoring the Oxford Handbook of Corpus Studies in Music (2023) and developing the Yale-Classical Archives Corpus. His work bridges theoretical, computational, and historical approaches to music analysis, with contributions to Science, Music Theory Spectrum, and Perspectives of New Music.