Sara Ballance, MA, Ph.D.
Lecturer in Music Theory and Analysis
USC Thornton School of Music
Email: sballanc@usc.edu
Sara Ballance is a Lecturer in Music Theory and Analysis at the USC Thornton School of Music whose work explores contemporary and historical issues of musical listening. She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as degrees in Pedagogy of Music Theory and Violin Performance from the Eastman School of Music, and in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester. After initially focusing on aural skills education and music cognition, including work as a research assistant in the Eastman Music Cognition Lab, her main interest has been in historical treatments of those fields. Her recent research traces how skilled musical listening came to be considered a defining feature of musicality over the course of the 19th century, investigating the changing scientific and philosophical visions of a “musical ear” that made this conception possible, as well as the development of specific pedagogical techniques for aural education. She has also explored the role of instrumental oddities such as silent pianos within 19th century concepts of noise, physicality, and musicianship. Her work has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant from UC Santa Barbara, and a Siff Family Educational Foundation graduate fellowship. She has presented research at numerous conferences, including national meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society.
