
Chris Stover
Chris Stover is Assistant Professor at The New School College of Performing Arts whose research focuses on interaction and improvisation, philosophies of time and process, and popular and folkloric musics of Brazil and Cuba. He is also an active composer and trombonist in New York City.
CHRIS STOVER is Assistant Professor at The New School College of Performing Arts, where he teaches Music Theory, Composition, and World Music, and coordinates the Jazz Theory curriculum. His research focuses on improvisation and interaction, philosophies of time and process, and the folkloric and popular music of Cuba and Brazil. In addition to his ethnographically-oriented GIDEST project, he is currently developing a theory of timeline music that involves the role of improvisation, music–dance interaction, asymmetrical temporal patterns, and rhythmic and microrhythmic flux in diasporic West and Central African music. His work has been published in Media and Culture, The Open Space Magazine, Music Theory Online, Journal of Jazz Studies, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and elsewhere, including chapters in the edited volumes Improvisation and Music Education and Sounds of Resistance. In 2015 he spent four months in Brazil researching folkloric music as a Fulbright Teaching and Research Fellow, and he returned to Brazil in 2016 supported by a New School Faculty Research grant.
Chris is also very active as a composer and performer in New York City, and has released seven CDs as a leader or co-leader, with two new recordings (Helical Quartet and the Caetano Veloso Project) forthcoming in 2016–17. His compositions explore process, growth, flux, and recontextualization, with careful and nuanced considerations of the relationships between melody and harmony and the ways these relationships can change over time.