Dr. Eric Saylor

Professor of Music History/Musicology
Office Location: FAC 323
515-271-1989
eric.saylor@drake.edu

Eric Saylor is Professor of Music History at Drake. He received a bachelor's degree in Violin Performance from Drake University, an M.A. in Musicology from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan. 

Dr. Saylor's area of specialization is British art music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing particularly on the life and works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and on pastoralism in music. He is the author of Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 2022), named a 2022 Book of the Year by the Presto Music Awards and the Financial Times, and English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955 (University of Illinois Press, 2017).  He is also the co-editor of two essay collections: The Sea in the British Musical Imagination, with Christopher Scheer (The Boydell Press, 2015) and Blackness in Opera, with Naomi André and Karen M. Bryan (University of Illinois Press, 2012). His articles and reviews have been published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, The Musical Quarterly, The Musical Times, Musik-Konzepte, The Journal of Musicological Research, Music and Letters, the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and he has presented his research at conferences throughout North America and Europe. Dr. Saylor is also the author of the Vaughan Williams entry in Oxford Bibliographies Online, contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Benjamin Britten in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and was a contributor to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

Dr. Saylor has received several grants and awards, including the Outstanding Teacher of the Year award from Drake's College of Arts and Sciences (2004), the Drake Humanities Research Scholar award (2018-21), and a Visiting Research Fellowship from Merton College, Oxford (2019). His other areas of interest include historiography, intersections of music and politics, and shape-note hymnody. He also served as President of the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) from 2016-2020.