Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater

2025 Kurt Weill Book Prize Honorable Mention for Drew Nobile’s “Sondheim’s Dissonant Tonality” from Here for the Hearing

— Kurt Weill Foundation

2024 SMT Outstanding Mutli-Author Collection Award

— Society for Music Theory

“This collection makes a significant contribution to the study of Anglophone musical theater by grounding discussions of meaning in the particulars of musical materials, using sophisticated methods developed by scholars of classical and popular music repertories. It touches on musicals old and new, traditional and experimental, conservative and progressive. It should inspire (if we’re lucky) even more such scholarship on this historically and culturally significant musical tradition.” — Christopher Doll, Rutgers University

“An important, timely, and engaging collection of essays on analytic approaches to the Broadway musical. The breadth of repertoire and analytical methodologies is impressive, and this reader learned something new from every essay.” — William Marvin, Eastman School of Music

“Here for the Hearing is a fine collection of essays that succeeds in its goal of demonstrating how the musical structure of songs in musicals plays an important role in telling the shows’ stories and making the characters in those shows come to life.”  — Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

Michael Buchler is Professor of Music Theory at Florida State University.
Gregory J. Decker is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Bowling Green State University.