President
Kate van Orden (US) is Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University. She specializes in the cultural history of early modern France, Italy, and the Mediterranean, popular music (mostly sixteenth century, but also in the 1960s), and cultural mobility. Her latest project is Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550–1800 (I Tatti Research Series, 2022), an edited volume. Her prize-winning publications include Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth Century Europe (2015), Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (2005), and articles in Renaissance Quarterly and Early Music History. In 2016, she received a French Medaille d’Honneur. Van Orden served as program committee chair for the IMS2022 Congress in Athens; she is editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Music, and—with Kay Kaufman Shelemay—co-edits the series Musics in Motion. She also performs on baroque and classical bassoon, with over sixty recordings on Sony, Virgin Classics, and Harmonia Mundi.
Vice Presidents
John Griffiths (AU) is a specialist in Renaissance instrumental music, especially for vihuela and lute, and of early Spanish music. His musicological interests also include historical pedagogy, organology, notation, music printing, analysis, performance practice, and digital humanities. Currently, he is a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a Membre associé of the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, and editor of the Journal of the Lute Society of America. In addition to a long career at the University of Melbourne (1980–2011), he has also held positions at Monash University and the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. He has served as president of the Musicological Society of Australia and head of the Arts Section of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society, an officer of the Orden de Isabel la Católica, and a member of the Order of Australia.
Théodora Psychoyou (FR) is associate professor at Sorbonne Université and current director of the Institut de recherche en musicologie. She specializes in history of music theory in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has published on the relationship of music and science, the reception of antiquity, and more recently on music practices in the Greek archipelago during Venetian and Ottoman rules. She is the editor of several music scores, especially by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Formed in Athens, Tours, and Paris, she has also been a fellow at the Villa Medici—French Academy in Rome (2005–7), member of the RISM group (early music manuscripts) at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (1997–2005), an associate researcher at the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles (1997–2007), and a board member of the Société française de musicologie (2012–21). In her faculty she is also the chair of several master degree programs, including a baroque music research and performance program.
Immediate Past President
Daniel K. L. Chua (HK) earned his PhD in musicology from Cambridge University and is currently professor of music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining Hong Kong University to head the School of Humanities, he was a fellow and the director of studies at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and later professor of music theory and analysis at King’s College London. He was a visiting senior research fellow at Yale (2014–15), a Henry Fellow at Harvard (1992–93), and a research fellow at Cambridge (1993–97). He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal. He is a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Chua has written widely on music, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, but is particularly known for his work on (1) Beethoven; (2) the intersection between music, philosophy, theology, and technology; and (3) the history of absolute music. His publications include The “Galitzin” Quartets of Beethoven (1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (1999), Beethoven and Freedom (2017), and Alien Listening (2021).
Secretary General
Cristina Urchueguía (CH) studied music performance in Valencia as well as musicology, art history, and hispanic philology in Würzburg, earning her PhD in 1999 with a dissertation on the polyphonic mass in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America in the sixteenth century. After working in Zurich and Göttingen at the Johann Sebastian Bach Institute she completed her habilitation on the comic Singspiel in the eighteenth century in 2009. In the following year she was appointed assistant professor at the University in Bern and achieved tenure in 2016. Since 2012 she is the central president of the Swiss Society of Musicology. In the same year she was elected member of the board of the Swiss Society of Humanities and Social Sciences, and since 2018 she is its vice president.
Treasurer
Beate Fischer (CH) is a trained financial woman. She puts her broad expertise to service in various industries, including the chemical, banking, fiduciary, and health sectors of well-known Swiss companies.
Executive Officer
Lukas Christensen (AT) received his master’s and doctoral degrees in musicology from the University of Innsbruck (AT). From 2009 to 2011 he was a co-opted board member of the Austrian Musicological Society and from 2010 to 2014 a research associate and project manager in the University Department of Music in Innsbruck. He has been the managing and digital editor of the peer-reviewed journal Acta Musicologica since 2012. In 2017 he became self-employed, working as an editor, copyeditor, typesetter, music engraver, and web designer for various music and non-music publishing houses.
Directors-at-Large
Rebekah Ahrendt (NL) is associate professor of musicology at Utrecht University. She trained in viola da gamba at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague (NL) and in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist in music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but with interests across the longue durée, Ahrendt’s scholarship proposes thinking about mobility musically, by tracing the processes by which ideas, people, and practices are transposed. Much of her recent scholarship focuses on music and international relations, including the co-edited book Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and, most recently, the co-edited forum “The Diplomat’s Soundworld” in the journal Diplomatica (2021). Her rediscovery of a trunkful of undelivered mail garnered worldwide media attention and resulted in a groundbreaking article published by her team in Nature Communications (2021)—making Ahrendt the first historical musicologist with a byline in that prestigious journal.
Mary Angela Biason (BR) has a bachelor's degree in composition and conducting from the São Paulo State University, continued her musicological studies in Portugal, and has a master's degree in Arts from the University of São Paulo. She specialized in the organization of musical documents and developed work at the Inconfidência Museum and the Carlos Gomes Museum, publishing thematic catalogues and works of the Brazilian repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has coordinated band festivals in the city of Ouro Preto and has organized special exhibitions on music in museums and galleries. Besides musicology, she studied museology in São Paulo and paper restoration in Florence. She participated in two processes for the UNESCO Memory of the World Register (National Register in 2014 and International Register in 2017), and is a founding member of the Brazilian Association of Musicology as well as a member of the Musicology Center of Penedo, Alagoas. She worked in the Municipal Secretariat of Culture of Campinas and is currently a collaborator of the Carlos Gomes Museum.
Andrea Bombi (ES), PhD by the Universidad de Zaragoza, is professor of Italian language and literature at the Universitat de València, and has taught music history in the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya. He has published several essays and editions on the Italian Renaissance madrigal. His research currently focuses on Spanish vocal music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He recently published the monograph Entre tradición y modernidad: El italianismo musical en Valencia (2012). His interest in music historiography issues has materialized in the publication of the volumes Música y cultura urbana en la Edad Moderna (2005) and Pasados presentes: Tradiciones historiográficas en la musicología europea (2015).
Anna Maria Busse Berger (US) is a distinguished professor emerita and Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Davis. She has published on notation, music and memory, mathematics and music, historiography, and music in African mission stations. She has won major awards from scholarly societies representing all three musicological disciplines: the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her fellowships include a Guggenheim and a year at the Institute of Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin. In 2019 she was made Honorary Member of the AMS. Her books include Mensuration and Proportion Signs (Oxford, 1993), Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, 2005, It. trans. 2008), and The Search for Medieval Music in Africa (Chicago, 2020). She also co-edited the Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (2015). In 2019 she received a major grant from the Luce Foundation towards a music history of Indonesia.
Federico Celestini (AT) is professor for musicology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He studied in Rome at the University La Sapienza before completing his PhD and habilitation in musicology at the University of Graz, Austria. He has been awarded several fellowships, e.g., from the British Academy (University of Oxford), the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (Cleveland), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Freie Universität Berlin). In 2010 he was a Mellon European Scholar and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Celestini combines interests in music, philosophy, and in social and cultural history. His publications include books on Haydn’s piano sonatas and on Viennese modernism. His latest book, about Nietzsche’s music philosophy, has been published in 2016.
Maria Rosa De Luca (IT) is associate professor of musicology at the Department of Humanities, University of Catania, where she is also the rector’s delegate for the Third Mission and vice coordinator of the PhD in Sciences for Cultural Heritage. She presides over the MA in Communication of Culture and Performing Arts and the Bellini Foundation. Her research involves the history of music declined through a perspective of social history; the historical soundscape studies; and Bellini’s works. She is in the editorial board of Musica Docta and in the executive board of Studi belliniani. Her publications include Musica e cultura urbana nel Settecento a Catania (2012), the critical editions of Mottetti sacri (1702) by Alessandro Scarlatti (2012). To Bellini’s works she has devoted the editorship of the volume Vincenzo Bellini et la France: Histoire, création et réception de l’oeuvre (2007) and the recent monograph on Bellini’s early works, Gli spazi del talento: Primizie musicali del giovane Bellini (2020).
Annegret Fauser (US) is a German-American musicologist and the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States. She is the author of Der Orchestergesang in Frankreich zwischen 1870 und 1920 (1994), Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (2005), Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (2013), The Politics of Musical Identity (2015), and Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” (2017). She was awarded the 2011 Edward J. Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, and her publications received multiple awards from the AMS and ASCAP. From 2011 to 2013 served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She has held residential fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the National Humanities Center, as well as fellowships from the NEH and a Marie Curie Fellowship.
Paulo Ferreira de Castro (PT) studied musicology in Strasbourg and London (Royal Holloway), taking a PhD with a thesis on the musical relevance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He has written music criticism and musicological essays on the aesthetics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music in France, Russia, and Portugal, and co-authored a book on the history of music in Portugal which has been translated into English, French, and Mandarin. His recent publications include the co-edited volume Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition (Routledge, 2021). From 1992 to 2000 he was the director of the National Opera Theatre in Lisbon. Ferreira de Castro is currently associate professor and head of the Department of Musical Sciences at FCSH/Universidade Nova (Lisbon) and a member of the board of the CESEM research centre, with a special interest in musical signification, intertextuality, and the aesthetics of modernism. He is a founding member and former chairman of the Portuguese Society for Music Research.
Evi Nika-Sampson (GR), after her music apprenticeship at the National Conservatory in Athens, studied musicology, theater studies, and German literature at the University of Munich, where she was awarded her MA and PhD. Since then, she has taught at the University of Crete and at the University of Patras. She is professor of historical musicology at the School of Music Studies of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where she was head of the school for three tenures. She has also actively participated in many institutions and councils in Greece, assuming, among others, the presidency of the Hellenic Musicological Society (since 2012). Her research interests focus on specific topics in Western music history, on aspects of historiography, on the genres of opera and music theater in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as on issues concerning Greek art music. She is a steering committee member of the IMS Regional Association for the Study of Music of the Balkans and associate editor of the e-journal Series Musicologica Balcanica.
Imani Sanga (TZ) is professor of music at the University of Dar es Salaam. His research areas include popular music, church music, postcolonial studies, social identities, and the music of Tanzania. He has published articles in: Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Yearbook for Traditional Music, African Music, Popular Music Studies, Popular Music and Society, African Studies Review, African Studies, African Identities, Journal of African Cultural Studies, International Review of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music, Critical Arts, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, and Journal of Literary Studies. He is a recipient of research fellowships from the African Scholars Program (2007), African Humanities Program (2009), and National Humanities Center (2019–20). Currently, he is completing two book projects provisionally entitled (1) “Sonic Letters, Decolonial Acts: Musical Figures, Swahili Literature and Anti-imperialist Struggles in Tanzania” and (2) “Traveling Sounds: Afro-Nativist Discourse and Nomadic Music Praxis in Tanzania.”
Nozomi Sato (JP) earned his PhD in Musicology from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2005 and is currently professor of music at International Christian University. After he taught at Keio University as professor of musicology (1999–2019), he was appointed to the current position in 2019. He obtained his BA and MA in musicology from Tokyo University of the Arts and also studied at the graduate level at the University of Cologne and the Ruhr University Bochum. His publications include The Typology of Instrumental Music in German Music Theory Writings, ca. 1650–1750 (2005), Rethinking Baroque Music (2017), as well as articles on music theology, education, and other scholarly topics. As a practical musician he conducts the vocal part of Keio University’s Collegium Musicum.
Christine Siegert (DE) is the head of the research center “Beethoven-Archiv” at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. Her research interests focus on musical culture around 1800 and the history of music theater, especially Italian opera, as well as music philology and digital editions. International projects include “Giuseppe Sarti: A Cosmopolitan Composer in Pre-Revolutionary Europe” (as PI, cooperation with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and “Beethoven in the House: Digital Studies of Domestic Music Arrangements” (as Co-I, cooperation with the Oxford University, RISM Digital Center Bern, and the Musicological Seminar Detmold/Paderborn). She is spokesperson of the advisory board of the German Musicological Society, serves as co-editor of Studien zur Beethoven-Forschung, Bonner Beethoven-Studien, and Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, and is the general editor of the complete edition Beethoven Werke. Her latest publications (as co-editor) are Bearbeitungen von Arien und Ensembles anderer Komponisten (in Joseph Haydn Werke, 2021) and Beethovens Vermächtnis: Mit Beethoven im Exil (2022).
Britta Sweers (CH) is professor of cultural anthropology of music at the Institute of Musicology (since 2009) of the University of Bern, Switzerland. She was president of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (2014–21) and is currently president of the Swiss ICTM branch CH-EM. Besides the transformation of traditional musics in a global context and music and nationalism, her research has been focused on soundscape research. Major publications include Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), Polyphonie der Kulturen (CD/CD-ROM 2006/8), Grenzgänge: Gender, Race und Class als Wissenskategorien in der Musikwissenschaft (ed., with Cornelia Bartsch, 2015), Cultural Mapping and Musical Diversity (ed., with Sarah Ross, 2020), and Climate Change, Music and the North (ed., 2020). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology and editor of the Equinox book series Transcultural Music Studies.
Laura Tunbridge (UK) is a professor of music at the University of Oxford, where she is also Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music at St. Catherine’s College. Tunbridge was editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2013–17) and elected as a fellow of the British Academy in 2021. Her publications include Schumann’s Late Style (2007), The Song Cycle (2010), Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars (2018), and Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (2020). From 2019 to 2022 she held a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust for “A Social and Sonic History of the String Quartet.”
Editors-in-Chief of Acta Musicologica
Jen-yen Chen (TW) received his PhD from Harvard University in historical musicology, and is professor of the Graduate Institute of Musicology at National Taiwan University. His areas of research include music of eighteenth-century Austria, Catholic sacred music traditions, and the interactions of European and Asian musical cultures. He has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Music, The Journal of Musicological Research, Musiktheorie, and Ad Parnassum, chapters for The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music and About Bach (essays for Christoph Wolff), and volumes of music for the complete works edition of Johann Joseph Fux and A-R Editions.
Arnulf Christian Mattes (NO) is associate professor (historical musicology) at the University of Bergen and since 2015 leader of the Grieg Research Centre. He received his PhD at the University of Oslo with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg’s American exile. Since then, he has received research grants from the Norwegian Research Council for projects on musicians in emigration and musical modernism. Mattes published in journals such as Twentieth-Century Music, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, and History of Humanities, and contributed to anthologies published by Cambridge University Press, Boydell, and Routledge. He served as editor-in-chief of the Norwegian Journal of Musicology and review editor of the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics.
Luisa Nardini (US) is professor of musicology and an Endowed Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, is an expert of liturgical chant, women, digital humanities, and global studies. She authored Interlacing Traditions: Neo-Gregorian Chant Propers in Beneventan Manuscripts (PIMS, 2016) and Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas (Oxford University Press, 2021). Among other recognitions, she has received an American Council for Learned Societies fellowship, the Gladiatore d’oro, the Kenneth Levy Book Subvention for Outstanding Publications in Early Music, and an inaugural research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Centre. She is co-editing with Adoyo Catherine a textbook on Global Early Musics ca. 700 to 1500.
Editors-in-Chief of Musicological Brainfood
Gavin S. K. Lee (CN) researches and teaches Sinophone, black and Sino-Afro, US minority, and queer/trans composers, with a special focus on twentieth-century tonal and avant-garde music. In addition to championing underrepresented composers, Lee has been among the first to advance emerging ideas and approaches such as East Asian ways of knowing music, global musical modernisms, global philosophy of music, global music history pedagogy, and queer/trans music theory. His publications include the forthcoming Estrangement from Ethnicity: Music and Sinophone Alienation, and two edited volumes, Queer Ear and Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music. Lee has collaborated with around 200 researchers in editing two books and three special journal issues, and convening more than thirty conference panels.
Melanie Plesch (AU) is a professor of musicology at the University of Melbourne. She holds degrees in music performance, music education, and musicology from her native Argentina and a PhD in historical musicology from the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Argentine art music and its intersections with vernacular and popular music, literature, and the visual arts. Her publications include monographs, edited books, book chapters, and scholarly articles in international journals such as The Musical Quarterly, Acta Musicologica, and Patterns of Prejudice. The recipient of various international research grants, in 2015 she held a research visitorship at the University of Oxford as part of Reinhard Strohm’s Balzan Project “Towards a Global History of Music.” She has edited dossiers on topic theory and Latin American music for the Portuguese Journal of Musicology (2017) and the Argentinian Música e Investigación (2020). In 2019 she was elected a corresponding fellow of the Argentine National Academy of the Arts.