Music Theory

Dr. Joshua Tanis holds a joint faculty position in the Departments of Music Theory and Conducting at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Dr. Tanis is the Aural Skills Coordinator for the Department of Music Theory, where he supervises and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in aural skills and keyboard harmony. In the Department of Conducting, Dr. Tanis maintains a studio of graduate students who receive lessons in aural skills, score reading, and clef transposition. In addition to his position in the Departments of Music Theory and Conducting, Dr. Tanis directs the University of Michigan Youth Musicianship Course. Before joining the University of Michigan faculty, Dr. Tanis was a member of the Music Theory faculty at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. 

Dr. Tanis holds the Doctor of Philosophy in Music Theory and Composition from Florida State University, the dual Master's Degree in Music Theory and Collaborative Piano from the City University of New York—Hunter College, and the dual Bachelor's Degree in Music and Biology from the State University of New York at Albany.

Dr. Tanis's primary research focuses on the intersection of musical and poetic forms in Richard Strauss's songs for voice and piano. He has presented this research at numerous conferences and invited engagements, including the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, the  Indiana University Annual Symposium of Research in Music, and many regional music theory conferences. Currently, Dr. Tanis is finalizing a pair of journal articles: one on Strauss's use of musical sentences and the other on Strauss's use of musical periods.

Dr. Tanis's secondary research focuses on music-culture relationships. His contributions to an interdisciplinary project on Mohican Moravian hymns have received publication awards from the American Society for Ethnohistory (2020 Robert F. Heizer Award) and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture (2020 Lester J. Cappon Award). These contributions appear in the following publications: "Singing Box 331: Re-Sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives," in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 4 (2019); "Music in Unexpected Places: Hearing New Histories of Early American Music," in Sounding Together: Collaborative Perpsectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century (University of Michigan Press, 2021); and Strong Wounds: Eight Mohican Moravian Hymns (Moravian Music Foundation, 2022).

In addition to his primary and secondary research interests, Dr. Tanis also studies American composers and poets, (dis)ability narratives in music, and musical theater. In collaboration with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dr. Tanis has completed an archival research and recording project on American poetry set by American composers. Dr. Tanis also conducts ongoing research on (dis)ability narratives in Henry Cowell's tone-cluster compositions. This research considers how performers, audience members, and instruments engage in (dis)ability narratives through non-conservatory performance techniques. Lastly, Dr. Tanis studies musical theater, with award-winning research on modulation schemas and their relationship to plot.