Sanna Pederson is a musicologist who teaches music history at the University of Oklahoma School of Music in Norman, Oklahoma. She grew up in rural Minnesota, majored in Music and English at Oberlin College, and received her PhD in musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. She taught at Bates College in Maine and Wesleyan University in Connecticut before coming to Oklahoma in 2001.
Her dissertation was a history of German music criticism in the first half of the nineteenth century. The reception of Beethoven had a lot to do with it. Her article, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life and German National Identity” drew upon the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, which ran from 1824-30. “Romantic Music under Siege in 1848” discussed how the 1848 revolutions affected music criticism in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung at that time. “Defining the term ‘absolute music’ historically” takes a broader view of trends in music criticism and aesthetics from mid-nineteenth century to the present. It was the first of her articles to make use of full-text search of digitized print media. Since there is so much more to be found from the nineteenth and early twentieth century online, a website seems like the best way to share research that is always in progress, being updated, corrected, enhanced, and connected to other data. Other publications can be found at https://ou.academia.edu/SannaPederson
C.V. (also with links to publications)
