Yannis Rammos

Yannis Rammos is an associate researcher in music theory at the Digital & Cognitive Musicology Lab at EPFL, and a member of the piano faculty at the European University Cyprus. A Russian-trained international pedagogue, he has taught in 2022/23 at the Verbier Festival Academy, the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität für Musik, the Estonian Academy for Music & Theater, and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, among others. His research is driven by the technical, interpretive, and philosophical aspects of classical musical art, focusing on the rift between structure and expression, the anxieties of “authenticity” and “originality,” the themes of piano timbre semantics, the use and disuse of musical analysis metaphors in (historical) performance treatises, and Russian musicological discourses. In most cases, he approaches traditions of linearity, including but not limited to those of Schenker, from various structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives. Formerly based at the Sibelius Academy, he completed his doctoral studies in piano and music theory at the CUNY Graduate Center and New York University, where he earned a doctorate in classical performance. He has recently published articles in Music & Letters, Quodlibet, and Music Theory & Analysis. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in piano. At EPFL, he is currently working on a formal model of the hidden repetition (“middleground”) of motifs, one of the most elusive, yet also most striking, features of the tonal canon.