Jee-Weon Cha

Jee-Weon Cha is a scholar with interests in analysis and interpretation of 19th- and 20th-century music, aesthetics, semiotics, and history of theory. He holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Music History and Theory), the University of Washington (M.A. in Systematic Musicology), and Seoul National University (B.M. in Music Theory). His dissertation, ''Music, Language, and the Tone Poem: Interpreting Richard Strauss's Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24,'' examines the Strauss tone poem through the triple lenses of theory, history, and philosophy. His article, ''Ton vs. Dichtung: Two Aesthetic Theories of the Symphonic Poem and Their Sources,'' which appeared in the Journal of Musicological Research 26/4 (2007), deals with the relationship between music and language as relevant to the genre of symphonic poem. Current projects include a book about the convergence of music and language in Strauss's early tone poems and Mahler's early symphonies, and an article addressing Schoenberg's unique technique of unifying the formal and the informal in his free atonal songs.