Stanford Humanities Center
Dr. Pheaross Graham is a musicologist and classical pianist examining the intersections of theory, practice, and lived experiences of concert performers. His PhD, CPhil, and MA in musicology from UCLA, MFA in piano performance from UC Irvine, and BA in music and BS in microbial biology from UC Berkeley have cultivated interdisciplinary and intertextual leanings in his research. He reads recorded performances as texts, demystifying musicians’ inner worlds. Dr. Graham asks how certain performers, pushed in plain sight to the margins on account of race, class, and identity, carve space for themselves in complicated musical networks. His forthcoming publications include essays on reconstructing Rachmaninoff’s subjectivity (Routledge) and Liberace’s democratic virtuosity (Univ. Illinois Press). He has presented work at the Annual American Musicological Society, Music and the Moving Image, and Music Performance Studies Today conferences. He enjoys initiating and organizing wide-reaching public conversations on performance.
SHC Project
Visions of the Pianistic Self: Don Shirley, Rachmaninoff, and Music Performance Studies
Dr. Graham’s immediate book project, Green Book Pianism: Don Shirley, Civil Rights Performance, and the Middlebrow Challenge, focuses on African American pianist Don Shirley and his musical activity during the civil rights movement. He profiles Shirley’s genre-blending, “Green Book Style” pianism, which aimed to stimulate “serious,” idealized, and engaged listening among audiences to approach the category of classical music, navigating through the problematics of racialized entertainment in the U.S. and concert hall anti-Blackness. His secondary projects contemplate recovering subjectivity, corporeality, and lived experiences within the framework of performance analysis of sound recordings. Accordingly, Dr. Graham theorizes the American transplanted, Russian aristocratic pianism of Sergei Rachmaninoff, engaging in micro-listening, concert emulation, and hermeneutics. Rachmaninoff’s inter- and post-Revolutionary negotiations of respectability amid dualities of idealist and public identities factor into his inquiries.
