Stephen Press has taught music history courses at Illinois Wesleyan University since fall term 1999. He has also held teaching appointments at Illinois State University and Arizona State University. At Illinois Wesleyan he teaches the two-semester Survey of Western Music History, the sequence of period style courses, and a general education course, “Dangerous Sounds,” which surveys music composed under Soviet rule. He earned his first Bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California and he received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His thesis, "Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev," won the department's prestigious Glen Haydon Award for a Distinguished Dissertation in Musicology.

Dr. Press has made many presentations on the subject of Prokofiev and Russian music over the years in venues ranging from concert halls to elder hostels to the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. He delivered a paper on the composer's ballet Skazka pro shuta (Chout, or The Buffoon; 1915-21) at the "Prokofiev 2003" Symposium held in Manchester, England in February, 2003 and introduced the Dutch premiere of the reconstructed score for the ballet Trapeze at the September 2003 Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam.  He has been interviewed three times by the BBC for programs about Prokofiev, and also at Princeton University for a British Arts Council educational film about the composer's ballet Le Pas d'acier.  Among his published works are articles in the journals Music and Letters and Three Oranges (Journal of the Prokofiev Association), and book reviews in Music and Letters, The New York Times Book Review, Slavic and East European Journal and Russian Review.  Professor Press's book, Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev is the first to make extensive use of the composer's recently published 1600-page diary from the years 1907 to 1933.  He is presently working on a monograph that addresses the reception history of Russian music in the United States.  In spring 2008 he was invited to become a pre-concert lecturer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  Press was an air traffic controller for ten years in Chicago and San Juan.  He is an occasional bassist and lives in Lincoln, IL.

Publications:

Book:
Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2006

Articles:
 "Keeping the Russes in the Ballets Russes:  Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev," forthcoming in The Ballets           
            Russes One Hundred Years Later, ed., Patrizia Veroli and Gianfranco Vinay, Accademia di
            Ceclia Press, Rome, 2010.
"'I Came too Soon,' Opera and Prokofiev's Early Career in America," in Prokofiev and His World,
            ed. Simon Morrison, Princeton University Press, 2008
"By Way of Le Pas d'acier, Prokofiev's and Yakulov's Ursin'ol' Comes to the Stage", in Three Oranges,
           no.10, November 2005
"Prokofiev's vexing entry into the United States," in Three Oranges, no.6, November 2003
"Trapeze re-interpreted," in Three Oranges, no.5, June 2003
"On the Dnieper: Reappraisal of an 'unfairly rejected opus,'" in Three Oranges, no.2, November 2002
"Diaghilev and the Two Versions of Prokofiev's Chout," in Music and Letters, February 2001

Reviews:
Vaganova, a Dance Journey from Petersburg to Leningrad by Vera Krasovskaya, in Slavic Review,
          Fall 2006
Musorgsky, His Life and Work by David Brown, in the New York Times Book Review, February 16,
          2003
Shostakovich in Context, Rosamund Bartlett, ed., in Russian Review, July 2001
The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8 "Europe," in Slavic and East European Journal,
          Spring 2001
Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev edited and translated by Harlow Robinson, in Music and Letters,
          May 1999

Interviews:
[about] Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev, BBC Radio 3, aired February 5, 2006
[for] "Le Pas d'acier 1925, A Ballet by Sergey Prokofiev," April 2005, a DVD produced by The Arts and
          Humanities Research Council of the U.K., Lesley-Anne Sayers, artistic coordinator
"Prokofiev in America," BBC Radio 3, aired August 3, 2003
"Prokofiev 1891-1953-2003," BBC Radio 3, aired March 4, 2003