Pheaross Graham is a musicologist and concert pianist with expertise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western art and African American music. He holds degrees from UCLA (PhD, C.Phil, and MA in musicology), UC Irvine (MFA in piano performance), and UC Berkeley (BA in music and BS in microbial biology.) Broadly speaking, his research offers new approaches to performance analysis. He works at the seams of theory and praxis, interrogating the inner worlds of marginalized concert performers by querying their aesthetic strategies for countering social, racial, ethnic, and class-based erasure within “high art-” leaning performance.
SHC Project
I Am Not an Entertainer: Don Shirley, Green Book Pianism, and the Middlebrow Problem
His current book project addresses a Black artistic experience in the long 1960s. It examines how Donald Shirley—subject of the 2018 film Green Book—consciously stimulated engaged listening, pushing against the grain of racialized entertainment in the U.S. He argues that Shirley connected seemingly politically disengaged “nightclub” music to the Civil Rights Movement while working to musically challenge otherwise discriminating audiences.
Dr. Graham’s other large projects theorize Sergei Rachmaninoff’s American-transplanted Russian aristocratic pianism. He engages in micro-listening, concert emulation, and hermeneutics. Rachmaninoff’s inter- and post-Revolutionary negotiations of respectability and interiority amid dualities of idealist and public identities factor into his inquiries, as do expressions of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Dr. Graham’s extensive classroom experience, for which he has received distinguished teaching awards, includes courses on everything from Western art music to EDM, musicals, rock, applied piano, and more. Having served as a researcher for UCLA’s Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classroom program has aided him in designing new courses at Stanford (Theorizing Blackness in Film and Music, 19th-Century Pianism, Reading Recorded Performances) as well as updating the major’s core course, Music History Since 1830. When he is not writing, he is practicing. As a pianist, he similarly enjoys curating recitals with an eye for inclusion and diversity in the concert hall. He performs a wide-ranging repertoire, sometimes with hidden messages for the audience to decipher.
