Brian Hart

Professor and Coordinator of Music History and Literature

Brian Hart (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1994) has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses in music history at Northern Illinois University since 1996. His research has concentrated on symphonic music in France and the United States. He is the author of "The French Symphony after Berlioz: From the Second Empire to the First World War," a 200-page study in Vol. 3B of A. Peter Brown's series The Symphonic Repertoire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). He planned, organized and edited Volume 5 of this series, The Symphony in the Americas, a comprehensive multi-authored history of the symphony in the United States and Latin America, which appeared in January 2024.

Professor Hart has written articles and delivered papers on such topics as Vincent d'Indy's influence on French symphonic development, Debussy and the symphony, the French organ symphony, the symphonies of Arthur Honegger, and competing cultural and political interpretations of the symphony in fin de siècle France. He is the author of the entries on César Franck, Arthur Honegger, Vincent d'Indy, Albert Roussel and Ernest Chausson for Oxford Bibliographies Online. He was the program annotator for the 2001 Bard Music Festival, Debussy and His World, held at Bard College and Lincoln Center, and he wrote an article on modern performances of Debussy's music on instruments of his day for the book Debussy in Context (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).

"In my classes I provide information about composers and their music as well as the cultural and political environments in which they worked, in order to see what music meant to the people writing and listening to it, and why music developed as it did. I acquaint students with as many composers, styles, and types of pieces as possible in order to expand their knowledge of the musical repertory and enhance their own performances." -- Brian Hart