Frederick Reece (he/him/his)

Frederick Reece studies music and sound from 1789 to the present. His research is particularly concerned with cultural and disciplinary issues of authorship and authenticity, and with the haunting and spectral qualities attributed to music’s presence in modernity.

Reece’s first book, Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon, (Oxford University Press, 2025) traces the practice of compositional forgery—i.e., fraudulently signing famous historical names like Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert to one’s own original works—across two centuries of classical music culture, from the 1790s to the 1990s. His articles, reviews, and book chapters have appeared in such venues as the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Mosaic Journal of Music Research, and the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory.

At the University of Washington, Reece offers a range of advanced music history seminars on topics related to his research interests (“Music, Authorship, and the Self,” “Music of Franz Schubert,” “Music and the Occult”) while also teaching core music theory and analysis classes for both majors and non-majors. Off campus, he is a frequent pre-concert lecturer at the Seattle Symphony.

Before joining the faculty at the UW in 2021, Reece was Postdoctoral Resident Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor in Music Theory at Indiana University and Lecturer in Musicology and Music Theory at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. He was educated at the University of Oxford (B.A.) and at Harvard University (M.A., Ph.D.), and has been the recipient of numerous research awards, including a DAAD Fellowship, a Harvard Horizons Fellowship, and the American Musicological Society's Paul A. Pisk Prize, AMS 75 PAYS Subvention, and Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship.