music theory & cognition

Kris Shaffer is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at Yale University and is currently working on a dissertation on György Ligeti's approach to consonance, dissonance, and harmonic syntax in his triadic works.  Besides studying the music of 20th-century composers, his interests include music cognition, popular music theory and analysis, and the role of technology in various musical disciplines.

Kris holds a Master of Philosophy and a Master of Arts in music theory from Yale University, a Master of Music in orchestral performance from the Chicago College of Performing Arts, and a Bachelor of Music in performance (with an honors thesis in music theory) from Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Kris is also an active performer and church musician.  He directs the Sunday morning service music ministry at Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven and performs from time to time as a freelance musician in Connecticut and Massachusetts.  He has performed with the Berkshire Symphony Orchestra (Williamstown, Mass.), the Illinois Symphony (Springfield, Ill.), and the Green Bay Symphony (Green Bay, Wis.).

See also Kris's music for Christian worship website.

Recently added content:

Profiler - a set of Perl scripts for analyzing sequences of chords (in isolation or in comparison with multiple chord sequences) in tonal or triadic/non-tonal pieces.
distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3

Dissertation-related materials - including an analytical chapter on Ligeti’s Passacaglia ungherese.