Rate My Professor Matthew Arndt

Matthew Arndt serves as Associate Professor of Music Theory in the University of Iowa School of Music, part of the Arts and Culture domain. His academic journey includes a Ph.D. in Music Theory with double minors in Music Composition and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2009), a Master of Music in Composition from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a B.A. with honors in Music Composition from Lewis & Clark College. Before joining the University of Iowa, he taught at Mercer University, Lawrence University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Arndt's scholarly work centers on the history of music theory, with a focus on the musical philosophies of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg, musical poetics, spirituality in music, and three-voiced chants from the Republic of Georgia. He authored the book The Musical Thought and Spiritual Lives of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg, published by Routledge in 2018. His peer-reviewed articles appear in leading journals such as Journal of Music Theory (“Schenker and Schoenberg on the Will of the Tone,” 2011), Music Theory Spectrum (“Form—Function—Content,” 2018), Theory and Practice (“Toward a Renovation of Motivic Analysis: Corrupt Organicism in Berg’s Piano Sonata, op. 1,” 2017), and Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (“Schoenberg—Schenker—Bach: A Harmonic, Contrapuntal, Formal Braid,” 2019). In 2014, he was an Obermann Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Iowa, advancing his analysis of Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19, which included organizing a performance event. Arndt has delivered papers at international venues, including “The Dark Side of Oz as Allegory of Spiritual Transformation” at the New Zealand Musicological Society (Christchurch, 2019) and the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music (Toronto, 2019), and a poster on musical sentences at the First Biennial Conference on Expression, Music, and Language (University of Connecticut, 2022). He also composes choral, flute, and piano music, drawing influences from Georgian and Byzantine chants, Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Thelonious Monk, Olivier Messiaen, and Arvo Pärt. Arndt has arranged Georgian chant for the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom into English.