Sam Reenan (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. He holds a PhD and MA in music theory from the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) and bachelor’s degrees in music theory and biological sciences from the University of Connecticut.
As an educator, Reenan strives to facilitate students’ growth as engaged musical thinkers, communicators, and respectful collaborators. At CCM, he teaches first-year theory, graduate courses and doctoral seminars. Prior to his appointment at CCM, Reenan served as Theory Coordinator and Director of Graduate Studies at Miami University, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses across all stages of the music theory and aural skills curriculum. As part of an interdisciplinary faculty team, he was awarded the Roger and Joyce Howe Award for Excellence in Disciplinary Writing Instruction for his role in collaboratively designing an arts writing course open to all majors. He has also previously served on the music faculty at Hamilton College.
Issues of symphonic thought, genre mixture, large-scale form, and identity figure prominently in Reenan’s research program. His first book, Symphonic Spectacles: Form, Identity, and Hybridity in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores these issues across a range of Germanic, American, and British symphonic works. His writings on topics including modernist music, harmony, and teacher development are published in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online (2022, 2016), Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and Music & Letters. He has presented at scholarly conferences across Europe and North America, including in Finland, Italy, Belgium, England, and France. Current research focuses on the music of Gustav Mahler and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Reenan is co-authoring a new book on Mahler’s Ninth Symphony while he is contributing several edited book chapters and article projects concerning formal interpretation across Mahler’s late symphonies. Other recent research projects examine intersections between new music and ecosystems ecology particularly in the music of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, as well as the concept of musical fluency in undergraduate pedagogy.
