Dr. Stefan Greenfield-Casas

Stefan Greenfield-Casas is a music and media theorist whose research is guided by a longstanding preoccupation with the interplay between music, myth, meaning, memory, and multimedia(tion). His recent research projects have focused on Japanese media properties and theories vis-à-vis these conceptual obelisks, including Square Enix’s JRPGs, the Evangelion saga, the Scott Pilgrim franchise, Star Wars Visions, and VTubers. He has presented research on these and other topics nationally, internationally, and virtually at dozens of conferences across the US, Europe, and Asia, including meetings of the International Musicological Society's Music and Media Study Group, the Royal Musical Association’s Music and Philosophy Study Group, the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, Music and the Moving Image, Ludomusicology, and the North American Conference on Video Game Music. 

Greenfield-Casas is also an in-demand writer, and has been commissioned to contribute to multiple edited collections, journals, and magazines. His scholarship can be found or is forthcoming in The Music of Nobuo Uematsu in the Final Fantasy Series (Intellect's Studies in Game Sound and Music series), The Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, and Translight: A Contemporary Gaming Magazine (one of fifty curated magazines available at Frieze Seoul, 2023). He has also contributed shorter essays to the American Musicological Society and Ludomusicology Research Group's respective blogs. His current book project, provisionally entitled The Afterlife of Square Enix’s Music: Resurrection and Replay, from Concerti to Covers, argues for Square Enix’s indispensable role in culturally legitimizing video game music through their (Western) classical arrangements and concerts, interweaving music theoretical analysis with Japanese media and marketing theories to both draw attention to the creative agency of the concert arrangers as well as critique the commercial structures that drive these product(ion)s. He is also co-editor (with TJ Laws-Nicola and Hyeonjin Park) of a special issue of the Journal of Sound and Music in Games on the theme of “co-op” based on the AMS Ludomusicology Study Group’s 2022 virtual conference on the same topic, which he helped organize. To that end, he is especially interested in fostering space for dialogues within and to situate his work, and has interviewed the likes of Mariam Abounnasr, Benyamin Nuss, Eric Roth, and John Phillip Santos (among others) for various research projects. 

Greenfield-Casas earned his PhD in music theory and cognition from Northwestern University, where he also earned an Interdisciplinary Certificate in critical theory. He earned his MM in music theory from the University of Texas at Austin—which he attended as a South Texas and Kennan Fellow—and his BMus in horn performance from the University of Texas at San Antonio with Highest Honors. He has earned additional certificates in pedagogy from UT Austin and UR. At UR, he primarily teaches analytic classes on Western classical, popular, and video game musics. He is also the faculty advisor for the UR Video Game Orchestra and occasionally teaches private lessons on Horn. Prior to coming to UR, he taught classes in music theory and aural skills at Northwestern.