Michael Spitzer is a British musicologist and academic.
Michael Spitzer was born in 1966 in Nigeria. He was raised in Israel and, in 1973, emigrated to the UK. He was a refugee of the Yom Kippur War. [1]
He completed his undergraduate studies at Merton College, Oxford, and his doctorate at the University of Southampton (awarded in 1993).
He taught at Durham University, where he was appointed to a readership in 2005; he then moved to the University of Liverpool after the 2009–10 academic year and remains a professor of music there as of 2018. He is a past president and chair of the Society for Music Analysis editorial board. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
According to his university profile, he is a specialist in Beethoven "with interests in aesthetics and critical theory, cognitive metaphor, and music and affect." [3]
He inaugurated the International Conferences on Music and Emotion series at Durham in 2009. [2] He co-organized the International Conference on the Analysis of Popular Music (Liverpool, 2013). [2] His publications explore the intersections between music theory, philosophy, and psychology. [2]
Spitzer's book Metaphor and Musical Thought (2004) is among the first two book-length music theory publications on metaphor and music analysis. It distinguishes itself by synthesizing literary metaphor with cognitive-science approaches to metaphor.