Stefan Greenfield-Casas
A quick intro...
I am a Texas-based academic and musician.
I am currently on faculty at The University of Texas at Austin and hold a PhD from Northwestern University. As a writer and researcher, I have primarily examined the relationship between music and screen media (television, film, streams, and especially video games). I also have experience working as a private tutor, archivist, developmental editor, curator, and freelance horn player. (Click here for my CV.)
A bit more...
I am a music and media theorist who specializes in the concert arrangement of video game music, transmedial adaptations, and posthuman vocalities. My recent research projects have focused on Japanese media properties, including Square Enix’s JRPGs, the Evangelion saga, Hisaishi's Ghibli scores, the Pokémon and Scott Pilgrim transmedia franchises, Star Wars Visions, and VTubers. I have presented research on these and other topics nationally, internationally, and virtually at dozens of conferences across North America, Europe, and Asia, including meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, Music and the Moving Image, the North American Conference on Video Game Music, the International Musicological Society's Music and Media Study Group, and the Royal Musical Association’s Music and Philosophy Study Group. My published research can be found or is forthcoming in the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, the Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, The Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, The Music of Nobuo Uematsu in the Final Fantasy Series, Pikachu’s Transmedia Adventures: The Continuing Adaptability of the Pokémon Franchise, and Translight (one of fifty curated magazines available at Frieze Seoul, 2023), among others. I am also a section editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Video Game Music (forth.), co-editor of Performing Video Game Music: Communities, Practices, and Histories (forth.), and co-editor of the special issue of the Journal of Sound and Music in Games on the theme of “Co-Op Scholarship” (2025). My current book project, provisionally entitled The Afterlife of Square Enix’s Music: Resurrection and Replay, from Concerti to Covers, argues for Square Enix’s indispensable role in culturally legitimizing video game music through their (Western) classical arrangements and concerts.
Further still...
Beyond my scholarship, I am a classically trained horn player equally at home in both classical and contemporary performance traditions. This is reflected in the locales in which I have been featured: from concert halls, churches, and cathedrals, to art galleries, museums, and an underground tunnel system (2x). At 15, I was the recipient of the International Horn Society's Paul Mansur Scholarship, granting me a lesson with Jennifer Montone at the 40th International Horn Symposium; at 19 I gave my international and orchestral solo debut, performing James Balentine’s Espirales Infinitas (international premier) while on tour throughout Italy. I also gave the world premier of Jason Holt Mitchell's Thermal Bloom for solo horn and fixed stereo (2015) which was written specifically for my recital and dedicated to the memory of my late grandfather. During my undergraduate days, I helped found SPEctrum, a San Antonio new music collective, and have since been an avid practitioner of free improvisation, conceptualizing it as the ultimate manifestation of musical play. My primary instructors were Lisa Bergman and Peter Rubins (both horn), and the trombonist, curator, and multidisciplinary sound artist, Steve Parker (new music). I have also participated in masterclasses with David Wakefield and Abbie Conant. My artistic practice is generally improvisatory in nature, and draws on theories of tuning, the gestural, paraphrase, glitch, assemblages, and sound mass/texture. I specialize primarily in free improvisation and works for unaccompanied horn / horn + electronics. You can listen to some recordings of my playing here.
