Yonatan Malin
- Chair, Music Theory
- Associate Professor of Music Theory
- MUSIC THEORY
Yonatan Malin is Associate Professor in the College of Music and Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His areas of research include the German Lied, klezmer music, schema theory, analytical approaches to world music, corpus studies and music-text relations. His book “Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied” was published by Oxford University Press, and he has published articles and reviews in the journals Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, Yuval Online, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR) and more. Malin is on the research team for the Klezmer Archive Project which received Phase I and II NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (2021-22, 2023-25). In 2019, he wrote, produced and performed in “The Beregovski Archives: Klezmer Stories from Soviet Ukraine to Boulder” with the klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals and jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer.
Malin served as editor of Music Theory Online (2011-14), was on the executive board for the Society for Music Theory (2016-19) and was Chair of the Society for Music Theory Task Force on Diversity (2018-19). He also served as Chair of the Work/Family Interest Group in the Society for Music Theory (2017-20) and he is a member of the Jewish Musics Analysis Group.
Before joining the CU Boulder faculty, Malin was Assistant and Associate Professor at Wesleyan University (2004-12). He earned a PhD from the University of Chicago and a BA from Harvard University.
Recent publications
- “Listening to Klezmer with Schema Theory.” Journal of Music Theory 69, no. 2 (forthcoming, 2025).
- With Daniel Shanahan: “Modes in Klezmer Music: A Corpus Study Based on Beregvoski’s Jewish Instrumental Folk Music.” Music Theory Online 31, no. 3 (forthcoming, 2025).
- Website produced with Daniel Shanahan: “Modes in Klezmer Music: A Corpus Study Based on Beregovski’s Jewish Instrumental Folk Music” (2024).
- “Timing in Klezmer Performance.” Analytical Approaches to World Music (forthcoming, 2025).
- “Poetic Endings and Song Endings in ‘Gute Nacht’ and ‘Der Leiermann’ from Schubert’s ‘Winterreise.’” In “Festschrift in Honor of Jürgen Thym,” edited by Ulrich J. Blomann, David B. Levy, Ralph P. Locke, and Frieder Reininghaus, 117–26. Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 2023.
- With Christina Crowder, Clara Byom and Daniel Shanahan: “Community Based Music Information Retrieval: A Case Study of Digitizing Historical Klezmer Manuscripts from Kiev.” Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (2022).
- “Modulating Couplets in Fanny Hensel’s Lieder.” In The Songs of Fanny Hensel, edited by Stephen Rodgers, 171-91. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
- “Ethnography and Analysis in the Study of Jewish Music.” Analytical Approaches to World Music 7, no. 2 (2019).
- “Introduction to Special Issue on Ethnography and Analysis.” Analytical Approaches to World Music 7, no. 2 (2019).
- “Eastern Ashkenazi Cantillation: An Interpretive Musical Analysis.” Yuval Online 10 (2016).