Music

In his dissertation in Music, “Vernacular Book Making, Vernacular Polyphony, and the Motets of the La Clayette Manuscript,” Sean Curran examines the social location of music-writing in the thirteenth century when, for the first time, a previously unknown polyphonic piece could be deciphered accurately from the page, and when an explosion in vernacular literary production also enabled written polyphony to circulate to new audiences.  Previous histories have considered the motet an elite genre because of the sonic complexity of its pre-eminent feature, the simul

Deirdre Loughridge completed her Ph.D. in music history at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Her thesis, "Technologies of the Invisible: Optical Instruments and Musical Romanticism," examined late eighteenth-century audiovisual media in entertainment and scientific contexts, and their impact on early Romantic music aesthetics and listening practices.

The research of Assistant Professor James Davies (Music) explores the ways in which musicology might engage with historians of science in thinking about questions of physiology, neurology and physiognomy in musical performance.

Professor Kate van Orden joined Berkeley's Music Department in 1996. A specialist in cultural history, she has published many articles and book chapters on French vernacular culture and the Renaissance chanson.

Lisa Jakelski’s dissertation in Music, The Changing Seasons of the Warsaw Autumn: Contemporary Music in Poland, 1960-1990, is a history of the state-supported Warsaw Autumn International Festival, one of the most important gatherings for new music in the postwar period. An annual showcase for musical modernism, the festival featured works that could not have been performed elsewhere in the European bloc at that time.

Brian Kane’s work follows two related trajectories. A Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition, Kane is pursuing a project that combines the practice of composition with a theoretical reflection on the nature of composing.

A Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music, Anna Nisnevich is writing a dissertation on The Silver Age and Its Echo: Saint Petersburg Classicism at Home and Abroad, 1897–1922. This study of Russian aristocratic culture at the turn of the twentieth century uses musical theater to complicate the commonly held view of the Russian Silver Age as a brief flourishing of arts and culture.