Brian Hyer came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990 after teaching at Colorado College and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Since arriving in Madison, his main concern in the classroom has been to situate the study of music within the broader realm of the humanities, a commitment that has culminated in a new undergraduate music-theory curriculum, implemented in the fall of 1997. His research involves the construction (and reconstruction) of historical modes of cognition for music of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, an initiative that blurs boundaries between music theory, music history, and music criticism.

A forthcoming book, Figuring Music, contexualizes the music of Bach, Rameau, Mozart, Schubert, and Wagner within and against contemporaneous cultural practices, from artificial perspective and landscape to stage design and stereoscopic photography; from natural history and human physiognomy to plant genetics and evolutionary biology; from mathematical logic and non-Euclidean geometry to political economy, cultural geography, and psychoanalysis.