Andrew Farina
Location
Lilly Hall, 218afarina@butler.edu
317-940-8806
Andrew Farina is a Visiting Assistant Professor of music theory. He joined Butler in the fall of 2015, having completed his PhD in music theory from The Ohio State University in 2014. During his time at Ohio State, he taught undergraduate theory courses for three years and was instrumental in developing the flipped-classroom model for music theory courses. He previously earned a dual BM Performance on piano and trombone and a MM in music theory.
Dr. Farina is a passionate teacher, whose philosophy is to equip students with the necessary tools to learn,understand, and share about the music they study. He is the producer for the multimedia video lectures to two major theory textbooks: A Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony, by Joseph N. Straus and L. Poundie Burstein; and A Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis by Jane Piper Clendinning and Elizabeth West Marvin. Dr. Farina has been a guest lecturer in undergraduate and graduate courses on aural skills acquisition, Classical-era rhythm and meter,development of rhythmic notation, rhythm and mensuration in Renaissance music, music theory pedagogy, and history of music theory. He previously co-authored the paper “More Than Fundamentals: Re-imagining the Non-Major Rock History Curriculum to Increase Student Aural Awareness” with Dr. Katherine M. Leo. This paper was presented at the 2014 Teaching Music History conference in Chicago.
Beyond pedagogy, Dr. Farina’s research interests include the rhythmic organization in late Medieval and early Renaissance music and the tonal works of Arnold Schoenberg. His dissertation Temporal Organization in the Masses of Johannes Ockeghem explores the diverse rhythmic language of the Renaissance composer, how its organization contradicts some assumptions about mensural music, and how variance may be an indicator of personal style. He has also presented the paper “Compositional Unity through Remote Neapolitan Regions and Vagrant Tonal Spaces in Schoenberg’s Opus 6.” This paper explored the large-scale harmonic structure of these early, tonal lieder by Arnold Schoenberg.
Dr. Farina enjoys watching hockey (especially the Detroit Red Wings), cooking, and ballroom dancing. He remains an active church musician.