Pheaross Graham

Dr. Pheaross Graham (pronounced /fur-AHS/) is a Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Lecturer in the Department of Music at Stanford University. He is a musicologist and concert pianist with expertise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western art and African American music. Broadly speaking, his research offers new approaches to performance analysis. Dr. Graham works at the seams of theory and praxis, interrogating the inner worlds of marginalized concert performers by querying their aesthetic strategies for countering social, racial, ethnic, and class-based erasure within “high art-” leaning performance. His current book project, I Am Not an Entertainer: Don Shirley, Green Book Pianism, and the Middlebrow Problem, addresses a Black artistic experience in the long 1960s. It examines how Donald Shirley—subject of the 2018 film Green Book—consciously stimulated engaged listening in unexpected places, pushing against the grain of racialized entertainment in the U.S. He argues that Shirley connected seemingly politically disengaged “nightclub” music to the Civil Rights Movement while working to musically challenge otherwise discriminating audiences.

His other large projects theorize Sergei Rachmaninoff’s American-transplanted Russian aristocratic pianism. He engages in micro-listening, concert emulation, and hermeneutics. Rachmaninoff’s corporeality and Revolutionary negotiations of interiority, exteriority, and idealism factor into his inquiries, as do expressions of Eastern Orthodoxy. He is also writing about the musical concept of “clean.” In-print publications span from democratic virtuosity and Liberace to pedagogy, Goethe, and intonatsiya. He has presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, the Institute for Russian Music Studies, the Music and the Moving Image conference, invited colloquia, and international venues. To keep the discipline moving, he enjoys organizing major conferences collaboratively, as he has with Music Performance Studies Today.

Dr. Graham’s extensive classroom experience, for which he has received distinguished teaching awards, includes courses on everything from Western art music to EDM, musicals, rock and roll, applied piano performance, and more. Having served as a researcher for UCLA’s Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classroom program has aided him in designing new courses at Stanford (Theorizing Blackness in Film and Music, 19th-Century Pianism, Reading Recorded Performances) as well as updating the major’s core course, Music History Since 1830. When he is not writing, he is practicing. As a classical pianist, he similarly enjoys curating recitals with an eye for inclusion and activism in the concert hall. He performs a wide-ranging repertoire, sometimes with hidden messages for the audience to decipher.