Philip F Salathe
Visiting Assistant Professor: Music Theory & Composition
The music of Phil Salathe ranges widely in scale and scope, from multi-movement orchestral pieces to hand-programmed "chiptunes" for independent video game publishers. His works have been performed in the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, and Asia, and at festivals and conferences hosted by SEAMUS, the College Music Society, the Society of Composers, the International Double Reed Society, the Asian Double Reed Association, and the European Biennial Double Bass Congress.
He studied composition at Bennington College, the University of Hartford, and Stony Brook University (Ph.D., 2014), where he served on the faculty in 2015 before coming to the Crane School of Music in 2016. His teaching history includes courses in music theory and analysis, composition, aural skills, music technology, and jazz theory and improvisation, among other topics.
In February 2019, Ravello Records released Imaginary Birds: Music for Oboe and English Horn, his CD recording project with longtime collaborators Oboe Duo Agosto. His next CD project is a collaboration with cellist Esther Rogers Baker and trumpeter/pianist Gene V. Baker, for whom he wrote his homage to five eminent jazz trumpeters, Don't Let Your Chops Freeze. His composition Three Street Pieces for clarinet and double bass has been performed nearly 40 times on four continents, and was a finalist for The American Prize in Composition (Instrumental Chamber Music division).
He has been described as one of the world's foremost scholars of the band Pink Floyd, and is the co-author, with Ian Priston, of the book Pink Floyd: BBC Radio 1967-1971, published in 2022. His conference presentations on the band include "How Women Composers, Songwriters, and Performers Contributed to the Music of Pink Floyd" (College Music Society, 2024) and "Iterative Composition Through Improvisation in the Early Music of Pink Floyd" (College Music Society, 2023). He also contributed musical analysis and commentary to Julian Palacios's book Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe, and has been interviewed for podcasts and radio programs about the band.
His non-Pink Floyd presentations include "Metrical Dissonance As Signifier of the Progressive in Rock Music" (given at the College Music Society's 2019 International Conference in Belgium), and "Silent Film Scoring as the Basis for a Pre-College Composition Curriculum" (given at Teaching Composition: A Symposium on Composition Pedagogy at UMBC in 2022), as well as presentations on his own music at the Hambidge Center in Georgia, the Wintergreen Festival in Virginia, and various colleges and universities throughout the United States.
Outside of music, he enjoys playing chess, learning languages, and exploring offbeat cinema. In 2015 he successfully competed on the television show Jeopardy!, winning one episode.