Megan Lyons

PhD Candidate, Music Theory & History

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M.A., Music Theory and Flute Performance, CUNY Hunter College

B.M., Music Education and Music Theory, University of Delaware

Winner of the 2021 Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Graduate Teaching Award. 

Megan Lyons is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant in music theory and history at the University of Connecticut. Her research areas include music theory pedagogy, music encoding and its analysis, Joni Mitchell’s use of alternate guitar tuning  and the art songs of Amy Beach.

She attended the University of Delaware where she earned a Bachelor of Music Degree in Music Education and Music Theory. She graduated in Spring 2016, Summa Cum Laude as well as a Degree with Distinction. While completing her undergraduate studies, Megan was a winner of the UD Concerto Competition performing Lowell Liebermann’s Piccolo Concerto. She was also a winner of the Newark Symphony Concerto Competition performing Vivaldi’s Piccolo Concerto. Megan was chosen to represent her university at the National Intercollegiate Band in 2015, serving as Principal Flute. She was awarded the DeMartini Scholarship at UD for demonstrating humanitarianism, professionalism, integrity, and unselfishness. She was also the recipient of the university’s Phi Kappa Phi Essay Contest Award for her summer research efforts and acted as an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for half of her undergraduate career.

Megan completed her Masters in Music Theory and Flute Performance at CUNY Hunter College in 2018. She studied as a Cutler Scholar for her performance capabilities and was asked to perform Vivaldi’s Piccolo Concerto with the Hunter Symphony Orchestra. She also served as the Communications Director for the Graduate Student Association of Hunter College.

In June 2019, Megan was awarded a full scholarship to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, studying Music Encoding. Continuing in the field of encoded music, Megan was selected to participate in the 2019 Society for Music Theory’s Graduate Student Workshop Program “Computer Programming for Corpus Analysis”, working with Michael Cuthbert of MIT. 

Her work has been presented at regional, national, and international conferences. Megan Lyons and Dr. Peter Kaminsky presented their work “Enactive Soundscapes: Physio-musical and Formal Process in the Music of Joni Mitchell” at the 2020 Society for Music Theory national conference. She organized and was a keynote speaker at the Joni’s Blue at 50 Virtual Conference hosted by UConn in 2021. In Fall 2021, her work on musical transcendence in the art songs of Amy Beach will be presented at the international Women’s Work in Music conference. She has also been a guest speaker on the UConn 360 podcast and The Theory Club podcast. Megan is the founder and co-chair of the Society for Music Theory’s newest publication, SMT-Pod.

In her free time, Megan enjoys going on long runs, completing sudoku puzzles, and doing escape rooms.

Publications:

“Don’t You Cry for Me: A Critical-Race Analysis of Undergraduate Music Theory Instruction.” Forthcoming in the edited volume Teaching and Learning Difficult Topics in the Music Classroom.

Making Your Lessons Meme-orable
That Wasn’t In The Syllabus, University of Connecticut, 2020

Hale to the King: “Three Brevities for Solo Flute” by Hale Smith
Global Music Modernisms, Volume 1, 2020

Training Ears with Peers: Establishing an Aural Skills Peer Tutoring Center
Engaging Students, Volume 3, 2015