Michael Spitzer
British musicologist
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Michael Spitzer is a British musicologist and academic.
Early life
Michael Spitzer was born in 1966 in Nigeria. He was raised in Israel and, in 1973, emigrated to the UK. He was a refugee of the Yom Kippur War.[1]
He completed his undergraduate studies at Merton College, Oxford, and his doctorate at the University of Southampton (awarded in 1993).
Career
He taught at Durham University, where he was appointed to a readership in 2005; he then moved to the University of Liverpool after the 2009–10 academic year and remains a professor of music there as of 2024. He is a past president and chair of the Society for Music Analysis editorial board.[2][3][4][5][6]
According to his university profile, he is a specialist in Beethoven "with interests in aesthetics and critical theory, cognitive metaphor, and music and affect."[3]
He inaugurated the International Conferences on Music and Emotion series at Durham in 2009.[2] He co-organized the International Conference on the Analysis of Popular Music (Liverpool, 2013).[2] His publications explore the intersections between music theory, philosophy, and psychology.[2]
Works
Spitzer's book Metaphor and Musical Thought (2004) is among the first two book-length music theory publications on metaphor and music analysis. It distinguishes itself by synthesizing literary metaphor with cognitive-science approaches to metaphor.
Selected publications
- Metaphor and Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
- Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Indiana University Press, 2006).
- (Editor) Beethoven (Ashgate, 2015).
- A History of Emotion in Western Music: A Thousand Years from Chant to Pop (Oxford University Press, 2020).
- The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth, (Bloomsbury, 2021)[7][8]
- "Can music give you an orgasm? The short answer is yes". Aeon Essays. 18 October 2021. Retrieved 15 January 2023.
- Spitzer, Michael. "40,000 years of music explained in 8 minutes". Big Think – via YouTube.
- Spitzer, Michael (September 2009). "Musicology's dialogue with emotion studies: Analysing musical structure". 2009 3rd International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction and Workshops. pp. 1–2. doi:10.1109/ACII.2009.5349502. ISBN 978-1-4244-4800-5. S2CID 15597044.