Michael Oravitz

Contact Information

Professional/Academic Experience

Michael Oravitz (M.M. and Ph. D., Music Theory, Indiana University, Bloomington) maintains research interests in the music of Claude Debussy, musical form, meter, theory pedagogy, and aural skills strategies. He teaches courses in theory and history at UNC.

Michael has published on formal designs in Debussy’s piano music in Res Musica (2015) and Les Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique (2013), and has presented theory and musicology-based topics on Debussy at a number of venues, including the Fifth Biennial North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music  (Nashville, 2017), the Ninth (Strasbourg, 2017) and Sixth (Freiburg, 2007) European Music Analysis conferences, the Seventh International Conference on Music Theory (Tallinn/Pärnu, 2014), the International Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Music at the University of Quebec (Montréal, 2012), the AMS/SMT Joint Conference (2008, Nashville), and a host of regional venues. 

He has published on aural skills strategies in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy (2012), and presented theory pedagogy topics at the Sixtieth National Conference of the College Music Society (San Antonio, 2017) and various regional venues.  Michael is also a current contributor to Professor Jenny Snodgrass’s (Appalachian State Hayes School of Music) Bridging the Gap blog devoted to fostering dialogue between aspiring high-school musicians engaged in advanced-placement learning and university instructors.

He is a member of the Society for Music Theory, The American Musicological Society and its Rocky Mountain Chapter, the Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory, and the College Music Society, and has served on various program committees for CMS, Rocky Mountain SMT, and Music Theory Midwest.

Links to Michael’s writings are as follows:

• “Student Empathy with Process in Post-Tonal Music: some Preparatory Activities,” in Bridging the Gap (May, 2017):  https://bridgingthemusictheorygap.wordpress.com/2017/05/30/student-empathy-with-process-in-post-tonal-music-some-preparatory-activities/

• “Meter as a Formal Delineator in Two Debussy Préludes,” in Res Musica no. 7 (2015): http://www.muusikateadus.ee/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/RM7_Oravitz1.pdf

• “The human and the physical in Debussy’s depictions of snow,” in Les Cahiers de la Société québecoise de recherché en musique no. 14/1 (2013):  https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/sqrm/2013-v14-n1-sqrm0620/1016198ar.pdf

• “The Use of Caplin-Schoenberg Thematic Prototypes in Melodic Dictations,” in Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy no. 26 (2012): https://music.appstate.edu/about/jmtp/use-caplin-schoenberg-thematic-prototypes-melodic-dictations