Peter Martens

Peter Martens is Professor of Music Theory at Texas Tech University and serves as Head of Interdisciplinary Arts in the Talkington College of Visual and Performing Arts. Dr. Martens holds a B.M. in Music Education and a B.A. in Classics from Lawrence University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Martens' research investigates the communication of musical rhythm and meter as a compositional, performative, and perceptual joint venture.  His work in this area has appeared in journals such as Music Perception and Music Theory Online, and as the chapter "Musical Structure: Time and Rhythm" in the 2017 Routledge Companion to Music Cognition. He has presented this blend of music theory, music cognition, and performance analysis to organizations such the Society for Music Theory (SMT), the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) - for which he served as Program Chair for the 2019 meeting in New York City, and the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC). Dr. Martens' other primary research interest is historical music theory, and he is the author of the edited translation Rhythm, Text, and the Recovery of the Past: Isaac Vossius's 1673 De poematum cantu et viribus rythmi (On the Music of Poetry and Power of Rhythm)(Routledge Press, 2022).

In Texas, Dr. Martens served as President of the Texas Society for Music Theory from 2015-2018, and is Co-Director (with Dr. David Sears) of the Performing Arts Research Lab at Texas Tech (TTU-PeARL).  Lab personnel were recently awarded a $10,000 Arts in Medicine grant to study the effect of music on the recognition of facial emotion in neurotypical and autism-spectrum populations, a joint project with TTU's Burkhart Center. In the Fall of 2017, Dr. Martens assumed the role of Associate Director for Graduate Programs in the TTU School of Music, and in 2020 became the Associate Dean for Faculty, Research and Creative Activity in the Talkington College of Visual and Performing Arts.

After serving as Acting Dean during the spring of 2022, he led the effort to create the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts, which he now leads as Chair.