Áine Heneghan

Áine Heneghan is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Washington. Before taking up this appointment in 2006, she taught music theory and music history at University College Dublin, where she held a Research Fellowship, and at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, where she completed her PhD with a dissertation entitled “Tradition as Muse: Schoenberg’s Musical Morphology and Nascent Dodecaphony” (2006).

She has undertaken extensive work on topics relating to the music and writings of Schoenberg and the Vienna School, and has presented her research at several international conferences and symposia in North America and Europe, including the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for Music Analysis. Her current publications include articles in the Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center, essays in collections published by Pendragon Press and Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and reviews in Music Analysis, the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and Notes, the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library. She is currently preparing a monograph, which explores the interrelationship and interdependence of Schoenberg’s theoretical writings and compositional practice, as well as a volume entitled Schoenberg on Form (to include a new edition of Fundamentals of Musical Composition), which will be published by Oxford University Press in the series Schoenberg in Words. Her broader research and teaching interests embrace the history of theory (with an emphasis on theories of form) and its analytical applications, twelve-tone theory, musical thought in the early twentieth century and the reception thereof in Europe and the US, sketch and source study, as well as dialect geography and ornamentation in the regional styles of traditional Irish music.

Heneghan has received funding from the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, the Österreichischer Austauschdienst (Austrian Academic Exchange Service), the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service), and the Avenir Foundation (sponsors of the Arnold Schönberg Privatstiftung, Vienna). She was a Fellow at the 2007 Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory.

In 2009, she was appointed to the editorial board of Music Theory Spectrum. She has also served the Society of Music Theory as a member of its Professional Development Committee (2003-06), and is currently a member of its Committee for the Status of Women (2006-09). She was co-chair of the Dublin International Conference on Music Analysis, the first event of its kind to take place in Ireland (June 2005); chair of the local arrangements and program committees for the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis (Seattle, March 2008); and, in 2007, initiated the UW School of Music Colloquium Series.

In addition to her research and teaching activities, she is an accomplished Irish harpist. She won the All-Ireland (Fleadh Ceoil na hÉireann), Pan-Celtic International, and other major harp competitions; toured extensively with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann; and is active as a harp teacher and adjudicator at traditional Irish music festivals.

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