Bethany Brinson is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. She is a scholar of contemporary experimental music, with a focus on sound art and multimedia works in Europe and the United States. Her dissertation offers a cultural history of immersive sound art from its inception in the 1970s to the 1990s. She regularly presents her work at regional and national conferences. In November 2025, she presented a paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society on the topic of environmental sound art and interspecies empathy. In Spring 2025, she taught an undergraduate course at Eastman, titled “Understanding Musical Culture and Creativity, 1750-1900.”

Bethany also holds an M.A. in musicology (en passant) from Eastman. Alongside her doctoral research, she is currently on the collaborative piano staff at Nazareth University and on the piano faculty at the Hochstein School. Prior to her Eastman studies, she studied at Indiana University, where she double-majored in piano performance and mathematics along with a minor in French. Also a composer, she has written for a variety of ensembles as well as film scoring and electronics. Outside of all things music, Bethany enjoys bird-watching, running, and drawing.

bbrinson@u.rochester.edu