Timothy Best is a music theorist and pianist from Charlottesville, VA. He holds a BM in piano from the New England Conservatory, and MM's in both piano and music theory from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. His interests include text/music relations in 19th-century music, pitch relations in early 20th-century music, form in the nineteenth-century (formal ambiguity, in particular), and music theory pedagogy. His research focuses on issues of musical meaning and interpretation, particularly using theories of semiotics, embodiment and musical gesture, and intertextuality. He is currently working on his PhD at Indiana University. His dissertation research, on form and meaning in Schubert's finales, has been presented at the Society for Music Theory's annual conference. He has also presented papers at the annual conference of Semiotic Society of America, and regional conferences such as Music Theory Midwest and the Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory. In addition to performances and presentations throughout the country, he has held teaching positions at Oberlin College and Indiana University. He taught classes on music theory and piano literature at the Lamont Summer Pre-College Academy at the University of Denver in the summer of 2012, and will be returning there in 2013.
