Gregory J. Decker is Professor of Music Theory and Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies at Bowling Green State University. He holds the M.M. and Ph.D. in music theory from Florida State University and was the winner of the National Opera Association’s biennial dissertation prize (2013). His research focuses broadly on the semiotics of musical topics and other music-cultural associations in texted music from Italian madrigals to Baroque opera seria to Broadway musicals. He has presented research at numerous regional, national, and international meetings, including the Society for Music Theory, the Society for American Music, the Semiotic Society of America, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the American Handel Society, and the Nordic Musicological Congress, among others. His publications can be found in Music Theory Online, The Opera Journal, Intégral, A Cole Porter Companion (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera (Oxford University Press, 2020)—a volume of essays for which he and co-editor Matthew Shaftel were awarded the Society for Music Theory's Citation of Special Merit Publication Award—and Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater(University of Michigan Press, 2023), co-edited with Michael Buchler. At BGSU, he regularly teaches core undergraduate music theory and aural skills courses and graduate seminars in musical semiotics, musical topics, and Schenkerian analysis.
