Varun Chandrasekhar: Music Theorist, Guitarist, Educator

Hey Friend! I'm Varun Chandrasekhar, a Ph.D. student in Music Theory at Washington University in Saint Louis. Prior to coming to WashU, I finished my undergraduate degree in Jazz Performance (guitar) at The Ohio State University and my MA in Music Theory at the University of Minnesota. My research focuses on the existential conditions of the jazz musician, studying how the jazz musician is, within Sartre's language, "thrown into the world" and "cursed to freedom." Although I'm getting my Ph.D. in Music Theory, I find myself engaging with multiple scholarly traditions. In drawing on writings from philosophy, African-American cultural studies, literary studies, and a whole host of other readings, I hope to show how the phrase "existence precedes essence" can help our analysis of jazz. I also study meaning in modern pop music and am heavily invested in phenomenological analysis of music. In my free time, I watch copious amounts of basketball and blunder copious amounts of pieces in chess! Please feel to reach out with any questions you have!