Adem Merter Birson

Adem Merter Birson is a GRAMMY-nominated Music Educator and member of the Recording Academy, specializing in global musical traditions, popular music, and eighteenth-century Western art music. At New York University, Dr. Birson has been instrumental in overhauling the music theory curriculum to include popular and global music, ensuring a more inclusive and culturally representative approach to analysis and pedagogy. His work emphasizes cross-cultural influences and the integration of diverse repertoires, bridging traditional and Western art music with popular genres and non-Western musical systems.

Dr. Birson's research in classical Turkish music explores modal theory (makam) within the Ottoman tradition. His most recent work includes a chapter on pitch prolongation in Ottoman classical repertoire in Modeling Musical Analysis, edited by Kimberly Loeffert and John Peterson (Oxford University Press, 2025). He presented a poster on this topic at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory. His video essay, "Understanding Turkish Classical Makam," is published in SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Video Journal (2020). As a performer of the Turkish lute (ud), Dr. Birson has played with ensembles such as the Eurasia Consort and the Turkish American Orchestra. He has studied and performed with ud virtuoso Alper Karaağaçlı in Trabzon, Türkiye. His YouTube channel, Turkish Ud Lessons, offers instructional videos in English on makam theory, ud technique, and Turkish music history.

His research on Western music centers on the relationship between chromatic harmony and form in the music of Joseph Haydn, with articles published in HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America (2014, 2020). His broader interests include exoticism, genre and cultural hybridity, topic theory, and galant schemata in the partimento tradition. He currently serves as Secretary of the Haydn Society of North America.

A dedicated educator, Dr. Birson was invited to participate in the Harvard Radcliffe Accelerator Workshop "A Music Theory Curriculum for the Twenty-First Century," led by Alexander Rehding and Suzanne Clarke, which examines how to replace outdated theory curricula based on 18th-century European art music with more diverse and inclusive repertoires. He also served as a guest editor for The Engaged Musician: Theory and Analysis for the Twenty-First Century by Philip Ewell, Cora Palfy, and Rosa Abrahams (W. W. Norton, expected 2026). Dr. Birson has published on innovative pedagogy in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy Online (2017) and was awarded the Graduate Teaching as Research/Teagle Fellowship from Cornell University (2012).

Dr. Birson holds degrees from Cornell University and CUNY Queens College. He previously served as Assistant Professor and Director of the Conservatory at Ipek University in Ankara, Türkiye, and as an adjunct faculty member at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York.