Professor Táhirih Motazedian
Theorist
She/Her
Táhirih Motazedian is an Associate Professor of Music at Vassar College. Her book, Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film (University of California Press, 2023) explores how key and pitch relationships in film soundtracks tell a story, and was awarded the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Book Award. She has published (and forthcoming) articles and chapters on a range of topics, including Sergei Eisenstein’s production of Die Walküre, the “heartstring schema” in film and nineteenth-century music, Holst’s Planets, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the film Black Swan, Shostakovich’s second violin concerto, and plagal half cadences in pop music. She earned her PhD in music theory from Yale University, and she currently serves as Associate Editor of the SMT-V journal. Before her career in music theory, Táhirih was a planetary scientist at NASA, working with lunar samples, solar samples, and serving as a Downlink Operations Lead for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Email: tmotazedian@vassar.edu
