Department of Music Lecture: Roland Wiggins’s (META) Music Theory: How to “Become your own Theorist”
Marc Hannaford, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, University of Michigan
Title:
Roland Wiggins’s (META) Music Theory: How to “Become your own Theorist”
Abstract:
This talk discusses the work of Roland Arlington Wiggins (1932–2019), a prodigious theorist and pedagogue whose influence on jazz and improvised music in the second half of the twentieth century is submerged but immense. Drawing on largely untapped archival and historical sources, published and self-conducted interviews, critical historiography, and music theory and analysis, I provide historical background and context for Wiggins and his music theoretical work, as well as offer a speculative view of how Wiggins used deontic logic to help musicians “become their own theorists.” The resulting insights suggest radically new possibilities for music theory, analysis, performance, composition, improvisation, and pedagogy. Wiggins and his work, I argue, helps us interrogate common understandings of who counts as a music theorist and what counts as music theory in the first place, and thus represents a crucial step toward curating a truer view of the American music theoretical landscape.
Biography:
Marc Hannaford is a music theorist whose interests lie at the intersection of jazz and improvisation, identity (especially race, gender, and disability), and performance. The Society for Music Theory awarded him an Emerging Scholar Award for his article “Fugitive Music Theory and George Russell’s Theory of Tonality” in 2023. He also received the University of Michigan’s highest award for early- and mid-career scholars, the Henry Russel Award in 2025. His current book project examines a genealogy of music theory developed by African American musicians in the twentieth century.
He completed his PhD at Columbia University in 2019 with a dissertation on Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist, composer, and cofounder of the Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians (AACM). His publications appear in Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Women & Music, Sound American, and The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory.
As a committed pedagogue, Marc helps students develop personal engagements with music via the critical exploration of manifold approaches: theoretical, analytical, historical, and creative. He offers courses on jazz, twentieth-century music, improvisation, performance, and Black experimental music, in addition to teaching core theory.
He is an improvising pianist, composer, and electronic musician who has performed and/or recorded with Tim Berne, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, Tony Malaby, and William Parker. He is also a founding member of the Engaged Music Theory Working Group, which highlights scholarly work that confronts the centralized, historically Eurocentric, and heteropatriarchal framing of North American music theory.
Originally from Australia, Marc discovered academic music theory through performance and his conservatory training as a jazz pianist. In 2010 he completed a research project that adapts composer Elliott Carter’s rhythmic language for improvised contexts. This convergence of contemporary composition, rhythmic complexity, and improvisation led him to the United States and remains a secondary research interest.
Between research, teaching, and performing, Marc enjoys cooking, walking his dog (Reggie), and outdoor activities such as soccer, and hiking.