Education
- Ph.D., Music (Musicology)
- M.A., Music
- M.Mus., Music Theory
- B.Mus., Music Education and Jazz Studies
Research Areas
Philosophy of interpretation (hermeneutics), musical meaning, music analysis, history of theory, digital musicology, French and American music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bebop.
Bio
Dylan is Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Affiliate Faculty in Musicology at Florida State University. He previously served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University and as Lecturer and Postgraduate Research Associate at Princeton University. As a Ph.D. candidate, Dylan taught music history and theory at The College of New Jersey and Temple University while coordinating the music theory curriculum for the Temple University Music Preparatory, which makes music instruction accessible to Philadelphia youth.
Dylan’s research focuses on the relationship between musical and philosophical hermeneutics. In particular, he uses the philosophy of interpretation to critique varieties of the belief that music is intrinsically special. His publication projects trace this way of thinking, called “musical exceptionalism,” as it has shaped numerous areas of music history and theory—including music analysis, jazz aesthetics, philosophies of interpretation, ineffability, immediacy, and sound studies. Dylan’s first book, Extramusical: Topic Theory and the Politics of Meaning (University of California Press, 2027), traces the intellectual history of the divide between “music itself” and everything else. From before the dawn of Romanticism through the rise of twentieth-century structuralism, the notion of the “extra-musical” has determined what counts as “music,” stoked feuds between music historians and theorists, and guided the evolution of our present-day frameworks for understanding what music means.
Dylan’s analytical projects address extended tonality in the music of Les Six and mid-century bebop improvisations. His research in these areas has been supported by multiple grants from the Paul Sacher Stiftung and Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities, and it has appeared in 19th-Century Music, Music Theory Online, the Journal of Music Theory (forthcoming), and at conferences across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Serbia, Greece, and Brazil, including the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, the International Musicological Society, the Philosophy Study Group of the Royal Musical Association, and IRCAM (Paris).
As a mutiple woodwind performer, Dylan has played saxophones, flutes, and clarinets with the Artosphere Festival Orchestra, the Philly Singers, Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, at the Walnut Street, Media, and Horizon Theatres, and on the PBS television show Articulate!.