Olivia Lucas

Associate Professor of Music Theory

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Biography

Dr. Lucas’ interdisciplinary research combines music theory with ethnography, sound studies, and ecomusicology. Much of her work focuses on the analysis—broadly conceived—of extreme metal music. Issues that arise in analyzing this music, such as extreme loudness, rhythmic complexity and screamed vocals, require critical examination of the tools of musical and cultural analysis, and facilitates reflection on how musical analysis deals with those issues across other repertoires.

Her articles on the music of the Swedish metal band Meshuggah appear in Music Theory Online (2018; 2021). Additional articles on metal music—on environmentalist black metal, the Aotearoa New Zealand band Alien Weaponry, and American experimental metal act Sunn O)))—appear in Popular Music and the Journal of Sonic Studies. Her article "Performing Analysis, Performing Metal: Meshuggah, Edvard Hansson, and the Analytical Light Show" won the 2023 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory as well as the 2023 Adam Krims Award from the SMT's Popular Music Interest Group.

Dr. Lucas has also published numerous chapters in edited volumes, including in the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory (on concert light shows), Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives (on Nicki Minaj), the Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition (on instrumentation in global folk metal), and in The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song (on Lingua Ignota’s cover of Eminem’s “Kim”). 

Dr. Lucas is co-editor (with Laura Moore Pruett, Merrimack College) of the collected volume Teaching Difficult Topics: Reflections from the Undergraduate Music Classroom, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2024. Other work on pedagogy includes the SMT Pod episode “Teaching Rhythm and Meter through Rap and Hip Hop,” in collaboration with artist and educator Mazbou Q.  

Dr. Lucas has additionally presented her research at annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory, American Musicological Society and Society for American Music, as well internationally at conferences in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Finland, and Spain.

As a teacher, Dr. Lucas has taught all levels of music theory, from fundamentals through advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. At LSU, she has developed courses on rhythm and meter, analysis of metal music, music and violence, sound studies, and sonata form, among others. She also enjoys supervising graduate students and helping them to get their work out into the world. She has supervised PhD dissertations in music theory on popular and video game music. 

Before coming to LSU in 2019, Dr. Lucas held appointments at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand) and the University of Iowa. She holds a PhD in Music Theory from Harvard University, and BA in Music and German Studies from the College of William and Mary. Dr. Lucas has also done expert witness work for music copyright disputes.