Professor Peter H. Smith recently learned that two of his articles in the British journal Music Analysis were among the most downloaded in the first twelve months since publication. The two essays—“Editors’ Introduction: Sonata Types and Theoretical Dialogues” and “Parallel Binary or Tripartite? Formal Hybridisation of Sonata Types in the Nineteenth Century”—are part of the journal’s October 2021 Special Issue on Sonata Typologies that the UK Society for Music Analysis invited Smith to co-edit along with his colleague Professor Julian A. Horton of Durham University. This invitation represents a distinct honor in light of the status of Music Analysis as one of the leading journals in the field internationally, and it further recognizes Smith’s reputation as a skilled editor beyond his current service as editor-in-chief of Music Theory Spectrum, the chief publication of the Society for Music Theory.
More recently in March 2022, Music Analysis published another of Smith’s articles, this one an extended study of the compositional genesis and musical organization of Dvořák’s Violin Concerto. And his collaborations with Professor Horton continue: their mutual interest in sonata theory and concerto form bore fruit last spring in a two-year seed grant from Notre Dame and Durham University for the project “Tradition and Innovation: A Corpus Study of First-Movement Form in the Nineteenth-Century Violin Concerto.” Among other activities, the grant will support a conference at Notre Dame in spring of 2024 at which Smith and Horton will host some of the world’s leading experts in the theory and analysis of musical form. They will report some of the most striking preliminary results of this ongoing research in a presentation this July at the Society for Music Analysis Annual Conference at Oxford University (OxMAC 2023), the most prestigious symposium for the dissemination of scholarship on music theory in the UK. The OxMAC program committee has also invited Smith to participate in a panel discussion “Analysis as Discursive Practice: A Collaborative Approach to Gade’s Piano Sonata, op. 28.”