Christopher S. Anderson
| Phone |
214-768-3160 |
Christopher Anderson is Associate Professor of Sacred Music at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, where he teaches graduate courses in history and theory in the Perkins School of Theology and the Meadows School of the Arts. He joined the SMU faculty in fall 2006, having taught previously in the Music Department of the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.
Anderson is a scholar and organist whose work has centered on early musical modernism, modern German history and philosophy, the organ’s position in Western culture, and the composer Max Reger. He has written extensively on Reger and his music in two books, Max Reger and Karl Straube: Perspectives on an Organ Performing Tradition (Ashgate 2003) and Selected Writings of Max Reger (Routledge 2006). In addition, his many essays appear in German- and English-language journals. His seminal 2003 study of Reger and Straube is the first extensive survey of any aspect of Reger in English and was the winner of the prestigious 2006 Max Miller Book Award, given by The Organ Library of the American Guild of Organists via the Boston University School of Theology. Recently, Anderson translated into English the second volume of Jon Laukvik’s Historical Performance Practice in Organ Playing (Carus, 2010) and edited the first complete survey of organ music in the twentieth century, Twentieth-Century Organ Music (Routledge 2011). Currently he is writing the first biography of Karl Straube, the early twentieth-century Leipzig organist and Thomaskantor whose work is central to the organ and church music cultures of modernist Germany.
Anderson is active in the Organ Historical Society and serves as an advisor for its publishing program. His mentors have included Peter Williams, Ludger Lohmann and Robert T. Anderson.
Education
Ph.D. in Performance Practices, Duke University, 1999
Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Stuttgart, 1991-92
M.M. and M.S.M., Southern Methodist University, 1991
B.A., Transylvania University, 1988
Recent Work
Publications:
Christopher Anderson and Dean Billmeyer, eds. An Introduction to the Organ Music of Max Reger. Annotated Performers Edition Series. Wayne Leupold Editions (forthcoming 2016).
“‘A Drop of English Blood’: Karl Straube’s Multifaceted Relations to England.” Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies 39 (2015): 56–81.
“Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy und Friedrich Schleiermacher: zur musikalischen Theologie des Paulus.” In Musik, Kirchenmusik, Theologie. Festschrift Christoph Krummacher zum 65. Geburtstag (München: Strube, 2014). 143–91.
Christopher Anderson, ed. Twentieth-Century Organ Music. Routledge Studies in Musical Genres. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
Jon Laukvik, Orgelschule zur historischen Aufführungspraxis, Trans. Christopher Anderson, Historical Performance Practice in Organ Playing - Volume 2, Romanticism (Stuttgart: Carus, 2010)
Max Reger at SMU (Soundboard label). Opp. 135b, 59/2, 67/3, and 57 on the C. B. Fisk organ op. 101 of Caruth Auditorium and the Aeolian-Skinner/Schudi/Dupont organ of Perkins Chapel. Fall 2009.
“Noch einmal Max Reger und Karl Straube: Gedanken über die bekannte Zusammenarbeit vor dem Hintergrund eines werdenden Straube-Bilds.” In Reger-Studien 9. Konfession – Werk – Interpretation. Perspektiven der Orgelwerke Max Regers. Kongressbericht Mainz 2012. Stuttgart: Carus, 2013. 229–46.
“In Bach’s Spirit: Karl Straube’s Liszt Editions and Their Background.” The Organ Yearbook 41 (2012). 115–36.
Selected Writings of Max Reger (New York and London: Routledge, 2006)
“... wie ein Anatom mit dem Seziermesser ...”; “Betrachtungen zur 'Meininger' Klangästhetik Max Regers," in Reger-Studien 7: Festschrift für Susanne Popp. Ed. Siegfried Schmalzriedt and Jürgen Schaarwächter, Schriftenreihe des Max-Reger-Institutes Karlsruhe 17 (Stuttgart: Carus Verlag, 2004): 457-475.
“Reger in Bach’s Notes: On Self-Image and Authority in Max Reger’s Bach Playing," The Musical Quarterly 87/4 (Winter 2004): 749-770.
Max Reger and Karl Straube: Perspectives on an Organ Performing Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
Course list
| Western music history and theory | |
| the organ in church and society | |
| intersections of theology and music | |
| performance practice | |
| German romanticism and modernism |
