In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of Venetian women began musical training in childhood to become professional musicians, known as figlie di coro (daughters of the choir), in the four charitable Ospedali Maggiori. These women overcame childhood poverty and abandonment to awe prestigious guests with their skills and even...
Within scholarship on mid-century Hollywood musicals, celebrity, glamour, and spectacle are commonly included in the conversation about the films themselves. Yet, what happened when these films – which privilege visuality – were adapted into purely aural forms, has not been as deeply analyzed. In this project, I track the cross-media...
In the nineteenth century, Jews across Europe entered a period of emancipation, at best a vaguely defined term that indicated the granting of equal civil and political rights, though sometimes conditionally and often incrementally. Concurrent to this, art music was dominated by deep divisions of stylistic and aesthetic approaches to...
“Musical Networks in Bergamo and the Borders of the Venetian Republic, 1580–1630,” examines the mediation and circulation of northern Italian music through social and professional networks with an emphasis on Bergamo, a thriving musical center during this period. In so doing, I challenge established narratives of early modern history that...
This dissertation explores how American television portrayed canonical European classical music in the Cold War era. I analyze televisual negotiations of music-cultural hierarchies to complicate common narratives about the postwar decades as a peak moment of polarity between “high” and “low” culture, and between ideologies of consensus and rebellion. Drawing...
For much of the twentieth-century, English-language music scholars were reticent to speculate about the origins of music. In recent years, however, the study of music’s evolutionary origins has been revitalized. Resonating Subjects brings a critical-historical perspective to this renewed convergence of music studies and evolutionary science. Through close examinations of...
The vaudeville remains an oft-overlooked genre of French song that was popularized by Paris’s fairground theaters and street singers on the Pont Neuf. Many histories of French music point to the middle of the eighteenth century as the period when the vaudeville began its rapid disappearance from the city’s musical...