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James Wright

Full Professor

• Ph.D. (McGill University)
• Email James Wright

On sabbatical leave, Winter 2024. 

James Wright completed a Ph.D. in 2002 at McGill University, where his dissertation on Schoenberg and Wittgenstein was awarded the Governor-General’s Gold Medal, the first time in McGill University’s history that this distinction had been conferred upon a musicologist. Dr. Wright’s primary research areas encompass music philosophy and aesthetics, music perception, film music, 20th-century music history, post-tonal music theory and analysis, dance and music, and the history of music theory.

His first book, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle (Bern: Verlag Peter Lang, 2006, 2nd ed’n 2007) received a Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society. His second book, Schoenberg’s Chamber Music, Schoenberg’s World (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2009), co-edited by �Ӱ�ԭ�� Emeritus Professor Alan Gillmor, was described by reviewer Frank J. Oteri (Chamber Music America) as “a book that reveals that Schoenberg’s legacy lives on in his chamber music; a substantive volume that fills an important void.” His monograph They Shot, He Scored: The Life and Music of Eldon Rathburn (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), examines the life and work of a fascinating and prolific Canadian composer who – in addition to producing a large catalog of orchestral and chamber works – wrote more than 275 film scores during a distinguished forty-year career as a staff composer with the National Film Board of Canada.

In 2022, James Wright celebrates the launch of a new book, co-edited by Alexis Luko (University of Victoria): Monstrosity, Identity, and Music: Mediating Uncanny Creatures from Frankenstein to Videogames (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022), and will host an international conference titled “Music and Antifascism: Reflections on the Past and Possibilities in the Present” ().  His published compositions are listed at .

In 2019, James Wright was named the University of Toronto Louis Applebaum Distinguished Visiting Professor in Composition (/fass/2019/10/music-professor-named-the-louis-applebaum-distinguished-visitor-in-composition-2019-20-at-the-university-of-toronto/).

Selected Publications

Alexis Luko and James Wright (eds.), Monstrosity, Identity, and Music: Mediating Uncanny Creatures from Frankenstein to Videogames (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022).

James K. Wright with Allyson Rogers, They Shot, He Scored: The Life and Music of Eldon Rathburn (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019)

James K. Wright and Alan M. Gillmor, eds. Schoenberg’s Chamber Music, Schoenberg’s World (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2009).

James K. Wright, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle (Bern: Verlag Peter Lang, 2006, 2nd ed’n 2007).

Media Appearances

CBC ‘All in a Day‘

A celebration of the 100th anniversary of Eldon Rathburn’s birth, and we marked the occasion with the first recording session in preparation of a forthcoming CD titled “Eldon’s House of Jazz” (in Normand Glaude’s Morning Anthem Studios in Cumberland, ON).

“�Ӱ�ԭ�� University Restores 1777 Frederick Beck Fortepiano” (July 28, 2011).

On the launch of the Carillon Program at �Ӱ�ԭ�� (March 28, 2011).

On the “Schoenberg Symposium/Concerts,” July 2007

On Eldon Rathburn, Lawrence Schoenberg, Ronald Schoenberg (‘Rathburn/Schoenberg Reunion,’ July 2007)