Jacob Eichhorn, PhD
Assistant Professor of Instruction, Music
Contact
Bio
Dr. Jacob Eichhorn is a clarinetist and music theorist whose research focuses on musical meaning across a multitude of twentieth- and twenty-first-century genres and styles. His dissertation work begins with the premise that experimental music (EM) is science fiction (SF) or, at the very least, that we can read it as such. According to Samuel Delany, the greater reading protocol of science fiction sets the genre apart from realistic fiction, that is, the literary techniques and linguistic structures unique to SF require readers to process language in a way that builds worlds beyond familiar reality. Likewise, experimental music is a genre set apart—a genre that asks its readers to read differently, that asks its listeners to listen differently. Therefore, the dissertation has two aims: (1) to demonstrate how experimental music (EM) as science fiction (SF) maintains a greater listening protocol that challenges social norms and cultural assumptions about what music is and what it could be, and (2), in so doing, to argue that composition becomes a form of speculation, a retooling of the imagination for the purposes of inquiry and critique as well as healing and transformation.
Dr. Eichhorn’s interest in meaning-making extends beyond contemporary concert music to popular music and musical theater. Through theories of agency and action, cognitive linguistics, and topic theory, Dr. Eichhorn has constructed semiotic models to demonstrate how listeners make meaning in the face of unexpected formal events, like abrupt endings, or when musical styles are extracted from their original contexts and implemented in new ones.
Dr. Eichhorn has presented his research at regional, national, and international conferences, and he is the recipient of the Irna Priore Prize for Best Student Paper at the 2023 Music Theory Southeast conference and the recipient of the Dorothy Payne Award for Best Student Paper at the 2025 Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic conference. He also has a forthcoming video essay on Leonard Bernstein’s implementation of the twelve-tone technique in Candide for Richard Straus’s Twelve-Tone and Serial Composition: The First 100 Years.
Dr. Eichhorn is Assistant Professor of Instruction in Music Theory at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is finishing his Ph.D. in music theory at the Eastman School of Music, and he holds a D.M.A. in clarinet performance and pedagogy and a M.M. in music theory from the University of Colorado Boulder.
