Thomas Patteson

Thomas Patteson is a musicologist, curator, and teacher specializing in sound technology, aesthetics, and the cultural history of modern music. His research and teaching explore the modern classical tradition and its 20th-century offshoots of electronic and experimental music.

Dr. Patteson has studied at New College of Florida, as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cologne (Germany), and at the University of Pennsylvania, and has presented his research at conferences in the United States and Europe. His book Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism (University of California Press, 2016), a study of experimental sound technologies in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s, received the 2017 Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society.

Actively involved in the Philadelphia new music scene, Dr. Patteson is an associate curator at Bowerbird, where he helped launch the Arcana New Music Ensemble in 2016.  He has also collaborated with groups such as Data Garden, <fidget>, and Philadelphia Sound Forum. He joined the Curtis faculty in 2013.