Ben Arnold
Director of the School of Music,
Professor of Musicology

Degrees:
PhD University of Kentucky
MM University of Kentucky
BM University of Kentucky

At UK since: 2003

Abbreviated Curriculum Vitae

Ben Arnold holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees in piano performance and received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Kentucky in 1986.

Professor Arnold has published extensively on the music of Franz Liszt. In addition to writing for and editing The Liszt Companion (2002), he has also contributed to A Guide to Liszt Research, New Perspectives on Liszt and His Music, Liszt and His World. Liszt and the Birth of Modern Europe: The Bellagio Conference Proceedings, Liszt the Progressive, Liszt Saeculum, and the Journal of the American Liszt Society, for which he was Visiting Editor 1989-1990.

He is also author of Music and War (1993) and has published related articles in The Oxford Companion to American Military History, The Musical Quarterly, The Music Review, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Holocaust and Church Struggle, and Handbook of the Literature and Research of World War Two. His research and collection of war music materials led to the founding of the Emory University Archive of Music and War. Other articles on various subjects have appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, the Biographical Dictionary of Soviet-Russian Composer, the Carl Nielsen Companion, American Musical Life in Context and Practice: 1865-1918, and the Encyclopedia of Keyboard Instruments.

Arnold has presented professional papers at numerous conferences in the U.S. and in Canada, Italy, Sweden, and Australia. He has been a frequent lecturer for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra pre-concert lecture series, the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta, and the Highlands Chamber Music Festival.

Before coming to the University of Kentucky, Arnold was on the faculty of Emory University for sixteen years where he served two terms as Chair of the Music Department (1994–2000) and as Director of Graduate Studies in Music (1991–1994). In addition to teaching required courses on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music, he also created several new courses: Wagnerian Opera, The Diva and Virtuoso in Classical Music, Apocalypse Now and Then, Shakespeare and Music, Music in England (taught at University College, Oxford), and a week-long opera course in New York City, “Emory-at-the-Met.”