Derek J. Myler is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. He holds the PhD in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music (2023), the MM in Music Theory from the University of Utah (2018), and the BM in Vocal Performance from Weber State University (2015). Derek’s research focuses primarily on the temporal experience of the listener and applies music-theoretical, phenomenological, and cognitive methodologies to the music of Charles Ives and various popular repertoires ranging from 1960s Motown to 2020s K-pop. His dissertation explored present perceptual experience and multiple temporality in listening to Ives. Additional projects in popular music analysis and Ives studies are ongoing; an article on Ives’s Harvest Home Chorales appeared in the Choral Journal in 2019.
Other areas of interest include 19th-century Polish music and musicians. In a recent project co-authored with Matt Chiu, Derek hand-encoded a new corpus of over one thousand common practice cadences that was used to investigate mazurka style in 19th-century practice. Additionally, Derek hosts an open-access database of pedagogical examples from the music of Maria Szymanowska for use in the music theory classroom.
Derek is passionate about teaching, and was awarded Eastman’s Teaching Assistant Prize for Excellence in Teaching in the first year of his PhD program and the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student in his third year. Before pursuing a career as a professional theorist, Derek enjoyed many years working as a music director and vocal coach for community theatres, as a collaborative pianist, and as a piano tuner and technician. Outside of music, he enjoys kayaking with his wife Shelby and their two daughters, as well as running and bread baking.