Research

Danny Fratina is a composer and music theorist with a research focus on harmonic practices in big band history, how compositional techniques circulated through jazz communities, and examining underrepresented voices in jazz theory. A PhD student in Composition and Music Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, he brings twenty years of experience as a professional big band transcriptionist, arranger, and composer to his scholarly work. In 2022, he completed an MA thesis on Tiny Kahn and bebop harmonic vocabulary at Istanbul Technical University, and he is currently developing a dissertation on Sam Rivers' omnidominant harmonic language and its relationship to avant-garde jazz composition. Preliminary work on Rivers has been presented at the 3rd annual Theorizing African American Music, the 29th Annual Conference Midwest Graduate Music Consortium, and the 1st Istanbul Music Theory Symposium.