African Diasporic Musics Expert Marcus Pyle Joins Music Department

The Davidson College Music Department is thrilled to announce that Marcus Pyle will be joining the faculty in the fall of 2021 as an Assistant Professor of Music. Marcus is excited about joining the Davidson community and meld musicology and performance together in inventive and socially-conscious ways.

In addition to receiving the Howard Mayer Brown fellowship from the American Musicological Society and a Dean's Dissertation Award from NYU, Pyle has also taught at MIT and Tufts University. His research centers on depictions of femmes fatales in French and German fin de siècle opera, intersections of gender and sexuality, continental philosophy, and African American lives and music.

Pyle studied Viola Performance at the Juilliard School (MA) and at the Royal Academy of Music in London (BA), Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College (MA), Music Education at Columbia University, and Historical Musicology (PhD) at NYU. His article “The Rhetoric of Seduction; or, Materiality under Erasure” appears in the journal 19th-Century Music. Another essay, "Nina Simone as Poet and Orchestrator," will appear in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

In addition to his work with musicology and viola, Pyle is also Founder and CEO of ChamberWorks (est. 2010), a music institute for beginning to intermediate string players in Dallas, Texas. He was awarded the "Making a Difference" prize in 2020 for his work with ChamberWorks."