Patrick Nickleson, PhD, MA, BA

About

I joined the University of Alberta as Assistant Professor of Musicology in 2022. Prior to that I had worked as an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Music at University College Dublin, a postdoctoral Research Associate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University (Kingston), and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History at Mount Allison University. I completed my PhD in musicology at the University of Toronto in 2017. My research focuses on unfounded claims of authorial propriety on sound recordings, across a number of genres, musical ontologies, and historical periods.

---

Research

My current research project is “Caring for Our Ancestors,” funded by a SSHRC Connections grant in collaboration with Dylan Robinson (UBC). As a settler historian, I work collectively with several Indigenous artists and performers on projects reconnecting kinship relations with Indigenous life incarcerated in museums and archives. Alongside the performances, research trips, and ancestor visits undertaken by the group, I am working on a book project on experimental music and art within long histories of dispossession under settler-colonial institutions of copyright, authorship, intellectual property, museums, and music schools.

My graduate training and most of my publications to date have focused on musical minimalism, its authorial disputes, its polciing by musicologists, and its indistinct status as an art music. These include my monograph The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (University of Michigan Press in 2023), and  articles in Twentieth Century Music and Journal of the Royal Musical Association which challenge, through published transcriptions and bootleg tapes respectively, minimalism's status as an art music. I am also closely involved in the work of Jacques Rancière, including as co-editor of Rancière and Music, and as translator of his essays "Afterword: A Distant Sound" (in Rancière and Music) and “Autonomy and Historicism: the False Alternative” (in Perspectives of New Music).

---

Teaching

I aspire to entangle my research with my teaching as much as possible. I am very interested in anti-colonial curricular reform in music studies, and in working with non-majors from across disciplines on critical listening and writing practice. I would be very keen to work with graduate students on any areas of contemporary experimental and popular musics, music and philosophy, poetics of (music) history, and in Indigenous, radical, and critical thought in their many relations to sound, art, and music.

MUSIC 101 - Introduction to Western Art Music

A study of music literature with an emphasis on listening and analytical tools. A brief survey of the history of Western music will be included. Not available for degree credit to BMus (all routes) students.

---

MUSIC 201 - Western Music and Contexts

Study of selected works and their meaning in a variety of musical, social, geographical, and historical contexts. Prerequisite: MUSIC 101 or consent of the department.

---

MUSIC 508 - Seminar on Music in Canada

Prerequisite: consent of Department.

---

Browse more courses taught by Patrick Nickleson

Patrick Nickleson and Dylan Robinson

Raven Chacon: A Worm's Eye View from a Bird's Beak (Sternberg Press). 2024 January;

---

Patrick Nickleson and Dylan Robinson

The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures. 2023 October;

---

Patrick Nickleson

University of Michigan Press. 2023 January;

---

Patrick Nickleson

Journal of the Royal Musical Association. 2022 October; 147 (2)

---

Patrick Nickleson

Rancière and Music. 2020 January;

---

Patrick Nickleson, Jeremy Strachan

University of Toronto Quarterly. 2018 January; 87 (4)

---

Patrick Nickleson

Twentieth Century Music. 2017 September; 14 (3):361–389

---

Patrick Nickleson

Intersections. 2016 January; 36 (2):13–26

---

View additional publications