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Forgione, Jessica
FIXED-TERM FACULTY
Biography
Musician, pedagogue, and creative designer Jess Forgione (she/her) enjoys a multifaceted career that connects music and games. Her research and compositional work engage with contemporary classical-tradition music, video game music, and other modern styles as both a scholar and a practitioner. As a keyboardist, Jess has performed in a variety of musical settings, including classical, jazz, progressive rock, and soundtracks.
Jess holds a BM in Composition from Baylor University and an MM in Music Theory from Michigan State University. Outside of academia, she has attended the Composition program at Brevard Music Center twice (2024, 2025) and studied with composers such as Tom Salta (Deathloop, PUBG, The Outlast Trials) at NYU’s Scoring for Video Games summer workshop. Her research has won awards from the Texas Society for Music Theory (“Functions of Chromatic Mediants in Video Game Music”) and Music Theory Southeast (“Race, Bias, and Musical Identity in Burleigh’s ‘Ethiopia Saluting the Colors’”).
As an educator, Jess strives to create an inclusive, accessible, and engaging learning environment, and her research on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy was recently accepted to Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy. Her teaching background includes music theory, composition, individual and group piano, and music technology. Prior to teaching at CMU, she taught at Michigan State University.
Outside of her musical and academic work, Jess enjoys tabletop games and works as a game designer for board games and tabletop RPGs. Most recently, she worked on AEGIS: Second Ignition (2025), a combining robot tactics game.
More about Jessica Forgione
Publications & Presentations
Publications
- Forgione, Jess. “Trauma-Informed Techniques for Fostering Joy, Belonging, and Success in Undergraduate Music Theory and Aural Skills.” Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy 10 (2026, forthcoming).
Conference Presentations
- “Trauma-Informed Techniques for Fostering Joy, Belonging, and EngagementWichita, KS in the Theory/Aural Skills Classroom,” Music Theory Midwest, 2026.
- “Keyboard Skills in the 21st-Century Music Theory Classroom,” Pedagogy into Practice, 2026.
- “Schoenberg is Dead: Reframing Serialism in the 21st Century,” Research on Contemporary Composition, 2025.
- “Race, Bias, and Musical Identity in Burleigh’s ‘Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,’” Music Theory Southeast, 2025.
- “Functions of Chromatic Mediants in Video Game Music,” Texas Society for Music Theory, 2024.
Education
- M.M. Music Theory: 2026, Michigan State University.
- B.M. Composition (additional studies in Piano Pedagogy): 2024, Baylor University.
Research Interests
Jess’s theoretical research interests focus broadly on music of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially classical-tradition music of Black composers and video game music. Her pedagogical research contributes to contemporary conversations on curricular reform and making postsecondary education more inclusive and accessible.
As a composer, Jess combines serialist techniques with narrativity to create meaningful musical experiences that are accessible to a wider audience than traditional serial compositions. She also composes soundtracks for video games.