Paul Ellison

Dr. Paul Ellison
Music History, General Music

Dr. Paul Ellison teaches western European music history and music appreciation at San José State University, combining this with a similar position at San Francisco State. For over 30 years, he has served as Director of Music and Organist at Church of the Advent in San Francisco, the city’s historic Anglo-Catholic parish, where he conducts the professional vocal ensemble Schola Adventus. He was appointed President of the American Beethoven Society in 2023 and is founding Vice-Chair of the American Friends of the Three Choirs Festival.

Dr. Ellison’s research interests include Gregorian chant, and the intersection of affect and topic theory, with an emphasis on Beethoven’s music. His publications include a monograph, The Key to Beethoven: Connecting Tonality and Meaning in His Music (2014), and Dear Max/Lieber Malcolm: The Rudolf/Frager Correspondence (2009), which he edited and annotated. He is a contributor to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music, Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the New Grove Dictionary. He is associate editor of The Beethoven Journal and founding co-editor of The Beethoven Newsletter. He lectures each summer at the Three Choirs Festival in the UK.

He completed his doctorate at the University of Cardiff, UK, in 2010 and
previously studied at SJSU (MA, 2003), Queens’ College, Cambridge (PGCE,
1979) the Royal Academy of Music, London, (B.Mus, DipRAM, LRAM). He is an active member of the Association of Anglican Musicians, where he served as 36 th President from 2017–19. Prior to moving to California, he taught music at several London high schools.