Michael Weinstein-Reiman is a historian of music theory. His work seeks to elucidate music theory’s role in the history of ideas over the longue durée. His related research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy, music pedagogy, literature, gender and sexuality, and disability studies.
In 2021, he received the Ph.D. in Music Theory from Columbia University, where he wrote a dissertation on the changing understanding of touch—considered as an action, a sense, and as a metaphor for music’s effect on the psyche—across the span of two centuries of French intellectual history. Research for the dissertation was supported by Columbia’s Dean’s Fellowship, a Georges Lurcy Fellowship, an honorary Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French Embassy, and several travel grants. He holds degrees in music from The University of Oregon, Mannes College, and Brandeis University.
His current book project, The Art of Touch: Musical Learning, Keyboards, and the Modern Self, is under contract with Oxford University Press for its Oxford Studies in Music Theory series. The book traces the musical concept of touch from the Baroque period through the early twentieth century, asking how literal and metaphorical understandings of touch overlap and shape musical pedagogy. It shows how Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers turned to the keyboard as a metaphor for theorizing modern subjectivity—often despite having limited musical training themselves. His second research project, Encounters with the Piano: Instrumental Music and Empire-Building in French Indochina, focuses on practical music education as a tool for French cultural indoctrination and control in overseas territories between 1887 and World War II.
His writing appears most recently in Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory, where his article “Visual Noise: Musical Representation in Hugo Riemann’s Tonvorstellungen (1914)” is included in Volume 30. He also contributed “Deconstructing Music Theory’s Ideal Listener with the Principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL)” to the “Accessibility and Accommodation in the Music Classroom” roundtable in the Journal of Musicology Pedagogy, 15, 2.
He has additionally written two entries on Marie Jaëll’s writings for Dictéco, an online, ongoing scholarly dictionary of composers’ writings edited by Emmanuel Reibel (ENS Lyon): “La Musique et la psychophysiologie (1896)” and “Le Toucher: Nouveaux principes élémentaires pour l’enseignement du piano en 2 volumes (1894)”.
Earlier work includes “Printing Piano Pedagogy: Experimental Psychology and Marie Jaëll’s Theory of Touch” in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, an article in Theory and Practice, a post on the Society for Music Theory’s History of Music Theory blog, and a piece in American Music Review.
He is a participant in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars (WTFS) program, a yearlong, UW system-wide program in which faculty collaborate across institutions on evidence-based teaching and complete a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project. At UW–Madison, he serves on the steering committee of the Center for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) and is a faculty affiliate of the Department of French and Italian (FRIT).
In fall 2025, he was a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. Previously, from 2021–22, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, where he taught music theory, history, and the graduate proseminar in world music studies; from 2014–19, he was adjunct professor of music theory and musicianship at Mannes College.