Kofi Agawu

B.A. Reading University 1977,
M.M. King's College London 1978,
Ph.D. Stanford University 1982.

Previous teaching at King's College London, Cornell University, and Yale University. Visiting positions at Indiana University, Hong Kong University and University of Ghana. Recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship (1990) and Dent Medal (1992). Grants from the Wenner-Gren Anthropological Foundation and Earthwatch.

Research on music analysis and West African music.

Wendy Heller

Professor of Music

Wendy Heller specializes in the study of 17th- and 18th-century music from interdisciplinary perspectives, with particular emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, and the classical tradition. The winner of numerous awards and Fellowships from such organizations as from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, Heller has been a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, and has taught in the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Specializing in the music of Monteverdi, Handel, Cavalli, and recognized for her expertise in the interpretation of Venetian opera, Heller has published numerous articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, Cambridge Opera Journal, Early Music, and Saggiatore Musicale. Her book, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice, was the winner of the annual book prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and was named a finalist for the Otto Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society. She serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards including Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of Musicology, and the Journal for the Society of Seventeenth-Century Music. She is also on the Executive Board of the Society for Study of Early Modern Women.

Her recent graduate seminars at Princeton include "Opera and Gendered Voices in Early Modern Europe"; "Handel in Italy"; "Music of J.S. Bach"; "Culture and Politics in Venetian Opera." At Princeton, she is the Director of the Program in Italian Studies, and serves on the Interdisciplinary Committees for Renaissance Studies, Program in Women and Gender, Program in Judaic Studies. An accomplished professional singer, her other research and teaching interests include women and music, Jewish music, performance studies, and opera from its inception to the present day. She is currently completing a textbook on Baroque music and a study of Ovid and the uses of antiquity in early modern Italian opera.

Selected recent publications:

• Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth Century Venice (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003).

• "The Castrato as Men: Trajectories from the Seventeenth Century." British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 no. 3 (2006), 307-321.

• "Amazons, Astrology, and the House of Aragon: Veremonda tra Venezia e Napoli." La circolazione dell'opera veneziana del Seicento,” ed. Dinko Fabris (Naples: Editoriale Scientifiche, 2005), 147-162.

• "Poppea's Legacy: The Julio-Claudians on the Venetian Stage." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36 no. 3 (Winter, 2005), 279-302.

• "The Beloved's Image: Handel's Admeto and the Statue of Alcestis." Journal of the American Musicological Society 58 no. 3 (2005), 559-637.

• "Venice and Arcadia," Musica e Storia 12 (2004), 21-34.

• "Dancing Desire on the Venetian Stage," Cambridge Opera Journal 15 (2003), 281-295.

Peter Jeffery

Scheide Professor
of Music History

After graduating from the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts in New York City, and from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Peter Jeffery received the Ph.D. in Music History from Princeton University in 1980. His dissertation was on "The Autograph Manuscripts of Francesco Cavalli," but his publications have focused on medieval music, especially liturgical chant.

While working as Cataloguer of Western Manuscripts and Editor of Publications at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (1980-82), Jeffery made several interesting discoveries, including a four-part polyphonic work from about 1300 that he identified as the only surviving example of contra duplex hocket (published 1984). Teaching and research positions at Harvard and the University of Delaware followed, during which he won the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1985), a major research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a "Genius Award" Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1987-92). He came to Princeton as a full professor in 1993, and is also a Benedictine Oblate of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.

Jeffery is the author of dozens of articles that have appeared in such publications as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Early Music History, Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft, Jewish Quarterly Review, Greek Orthodox Theological Review, Ephemerides Liturgicae, Concilium, Plainsong and Medieval Music, Worship, Studia Liturgica, and the Notes of the Music Library Association. His books include Re-envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant (1992), the three-volume Ethiopian Christian Chant: an Anthology (1993-97, coauthored with Kay Kaufman Shelemay), The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths and Bridges, East and West (2001), and The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (2006). His Gregorian Chant Home Page on the World Wide Web has received several awards.

Simon Morrison

Professor of Music

Simon Morrison, Associate Professor, teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, with an emphasis on Russia and France. He is the author of Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (2002), Prokofiev's Soviet Years (forthcoming 2008), and the editor of the Bard Music Festival volume Prokofiev and His World (forthcoming 2008). His other publications include essays on Ravel (the ballet Daphnis et Chloé), Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich (the ballet The Bolt), and numerous reviews and shorter articles, including pieces for the New York Times. In 2005 Morrison oversaw the recreation of the Prokofiev ballet Le Pas d'Acier at Princeton University, and in 2007 he co-produced a world premiere staging of Alexander Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov featuring Prokofiev's incidental music and Vsevolod Meyerhold's directorial concepts. His restoration of the original 1935 version of the ballet Romeo and Juliet will be premiered by the Mark Morris Dance Group in the summer of 2008. Morrison's distinctions include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1999), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2001), and a Phi Beta Kappa Society Teacher Award (2006). He has conducted archival research in Moscow (extensively), St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Paris, and London.

Education: B.Mus. University of Toronto, 1987; M.A. McGill University, 1993; Ph.D. Princeton University, 1997.

Awards: American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2001; Alfred Einstein Award, 1999; American Musicological Society Dissertation Fellowship, 1996; Charlotte Proctor Honorary Fellowship, 1995; McGill University Foreign Language Fellowship, 1991 (to study at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute).

Rob Wegman

Associate Professor of Music

My interest in late-Medieval and Renaissance music goes back to the first year I spent as an undergraduate at the University of Amsterdam, in 1979. The training I received there from Chris Maas was of the old-style, rigorous kind: paleography, textual criticism, notation and editorial practice, and archival studies. I still get tremendous fun out of pursuing these approaches. After graduation in 1986, I studied one year with David Fallows at Manchester, who encouraged me, in addition, to engage critically with fifteenth-century musical style. These various interests were brought together in my dissertation on the Masses of Jacob Obrecht, which I defended for the Ph.D. degree at Amsterdam in 1993.

In 1991-1995 I worked at Oxford as a research fellow, and developed there an interest in late-Medieval musical aesthetics and sociology. One project was a study of musical authorship in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, during which the modern concept of 'the composer' could be said to have originated. That project, in turn, sparked a fascination with the widespread late-Medieval practice of polyphonic improvisation, and especially how a deeper understanding of that practice might call into question some of the 'work'-based criteria that are habitually employed in modern criticism and analysis. From there it was a logical step to ask whether the most fundamental assumptions about music in late-Medieval culture may not have been conditioned more by views on hearing and listening than on composition and notation. (I organized a symposium on this issue at Princeton in September 1997.) In the summer months I continue my archival research on musical culture in late-Medieval Flanders, focusing at present on Alexander Agricola, and I have finally summoned up the courage to confront the (for me) deeply problematic figure of Josquin des Prez. This led to the International Conference "New Directions in Josquin Scholarship" (organized with NEH support at Princeton in October 1999).

Representative publications:

• "Sense and Sensibility in Late-Medieval Music: Reflections on Aesthetics and Authenticity," Early Music, 23 (1995), 298-312.

• "Miserere supplicanti Dufay: The Creation and Transmission of Guillaume Dufay's Missa Ave regina celorum," Journal of Musicology 13 (1995), 18-54.

• Born for the Muses: The Life and Masses of Jacob Obrecht (Oxford University Press: Clarendon, 1994, paperback ed. 1996).

• "From Maker to Composer: Improvisation Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 1450-1500," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 (1996), 409-479.

• "Who Was Josquin?," Richard Sherr, ed., The Josquin Companion (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Elizabeth Bergman

Assistant Professor of Music

Elizabeth Bergman earned her A.B. in Music magna cum laude from Columbia University and Ph.D. with distinction from Yale.  She specializes in music of the United States, with interests in 20th-century concert music, music and politics, cultural history, and studies in compositional process.  Numerous grants and fellowships have supported her work, among them an AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship, Dena Epstein Research Award from the Music Library Association, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  She has read papers at national conferences of the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, Society of Early Americanists, and American Studies Association.  Twice she won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award (in 2004 and 2007), and she received the Kurt Weill Prize (in 2007) for the best article on musical theatre.  Her first book, Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music.  She is also co-editor of the Journal of Musicology.

Her current projects include books on cultural exchange between the US and USSR, examining the history of VOKS and the State Department, as well as a study of American music in the 1930s (tentatively titled Music in the Crisis) with special attention to the cultural policies, practices, and organizations of the American Communist Party.

Selected publications:

• The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, co-edited with Wayne Shirley.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

• Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

• “Prokofiev on the LA Limited,” in Prokofiev and His World, ed. Simon Morrison.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.

• “The Best of All Possible Worlds: The Eldorado Episode in Candide.” Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 2 (2007): 223–48.

• “Mutual Responses in the Midst of an Era: Copland’s The Tender Land and Bernstein’s Candide.”  Journal of Musicology 23, no. 4 (2006): 485–527.

• “Aaron Copland and the Popular Front.”  Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 2 (2003): 409–65. 

• “‘Ye Sons of Harmony’: Politics, Masculinity, and the Music of William Billings in Revolutionary Boston.”  The William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 60, no. 2 (2003): 333–54.