​Jon Alan Conrad is an associate professor of music theory and literature in the Department of Music at the University of Delaware. The subjects he teaches include ear training; history of American musical theater; orchestration; and French, German and 20th-century English-language art song literature.

Dr. Conrad received his Doctor of Philosophy in Music Theory from Indiana University in 1985, with a dissertation studying style and structure in the songs of George Gershwin. He was a contributing editor for Opus magazine and is on the advisory board of the British journal Studies in Musical Theatre. He has written for such publications as Opera Quarterly, Opera News, and The New York Times. He is a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The Viking/Penguin Opera Guide, The Metropolitan Opera Guide To Recorded Opera, and The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Opera on Video.

His conference presentations reflect his special research interest in theater orchestration, which is one of the topics he wrote about for the New Grove Dictionary. At the conference “The British and American Musical” at the University of Bristol in 2006, he spoke about the challenge faced by those who restored the original orchestrations for the musical Carousel in 2000. At the conference “American Musical Theater” at CUNY Graduate Center in 2008, he was part of a panel presentation on “Musical Theater Orchestration, Past and Present” along with George Ferencz of the University of Wisconsin and Bruce Pomahac of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. He is editing full-score critical editions of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies for the series Music of the USA and of Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus for the Kurt Weill Edition. The former was used in performance by the series Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert and the latter by Opera North in Leeds, England.