Thomas Patteson (b. 1981) is a writer, teacher, and musician who lives in Philadelphia. From 2013 to 2023, Thomas was a member of the Musical Studies faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he taught 19th- and 20th-century music history. His two current research projects involve music's relationship to altered states of consciousness and the history of improvisation. He is preparing an English translation of Ernst Ferand's 1938 book Die Improvisation in der Musik, a groundbreaking history of improvisation in European classical music. 

His book Instruments for New Music, a study of experimental sound technologies in Germany in the early 20th century, won the 2017 Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society. Some of Thomas' curatorial projects include People's Music Supply, an artist-led platform for creative music and community-building, the websites Possible Music (2023-) and the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (2013-), as well as collaborations with Philadelphia-based presenting organizations such as <fidget> and Bowerbird, where Thomas helped launch the Arcana New Music Ensemble in 2016. Recent publications include translations of texts by Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus for the Oxford Handbook of Timbre, an anthology that won the 2022 Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society. Thomas has studied at New College of Florida, the University of Pennsylvania, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cologne.