Christopher Shultis

Christopher Shultis is a writer, composer and scholar and currently Regents' Professor of Music at the University of New Mexico where he has taught since 1980. Recipient of two Fulbright awards, he has also taught at the Technische Hochschule Aachen (1993-94) and the Universität Heidelberg (1999-2000). He received his Bachelor of Music degree from Michigan State University, his Master of Music degree from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. At UNM, Shultis teaches courses in American music, twentieth-century music, popular music, composition and interdisciplinary fine arts. He regularly teaches courses for the Freshmen Learning Communities program and is an adjunct member of the Department of American Studies faculty. He has served as Artistic Director of the John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium since 2001.

Highlights of Shultis’ publication record include "'A Living Oxymoron': Norman O. Brown's Criticism of John Cage," for Perspectives of New Music (2006); "Saying Nothing: John Cage and Henry David Thoreau’s Aesthetics of Co-Existence," Tijdschrift voor Musiektheorie (1998), which was translated into German and published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik  (2007),  "Cage and Europe," for the Cambridge Companion to John Cage (2002); “Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Non-Intention” for The Musical Quarterly (1995), and “Cage in Retrospect: A Review Essay,” The Journal of Musicology (1996) which won a 1997 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. His book, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, was published by Northeastern University Press in 1998 and is one of two books recommended in the seventh edition (2005) of the Grout History of Western Music "for further reading" on John Cage. The other recommended book, John Cage: Music, Philosophy and Intention (2002), also includes an essay written by Shultis, "'No Ear for Music': Timbre in the Early Percussion Music of John Cage."  He has served as an Associate Editor for Perspectives of New Music since 1999 and is currently working on a book-length comparison of musical experimentalism in the United States and continental Europe titled "The Dialectics of Experimentalism," from which one completed chapter will be published in The Music and Writings of Thomas DeLio by the Mellen Press in 2008.