School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-50 of 56 Results

  • Patricia Alessandrini

    Patricia Alessandrini

    Assistant Professor of Music

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsComputer-assisted analysis, composition
    Physical computing and robotics
    Multimedia interactive performance, aesthetics and paradigms of multimedia interaction
    Feminist perspectives on electronic music practices
    Use of technology in inclusive music, interfaces for the disabled
    Music Information Retrieval (MIR), concatenative synthesis, and physical modelling
    Motion capture, gestural control of electronics, and kinetics in electronics
    Music and sound design for film, video and installation art

  • Mark Applebaum

    Mark Applebaum

    Leland and Edith Smith Professor

    BioStudied with Brian Ferneyhough, Joji Yuasa, Rand Steiger; additional studies with Roger Reynolds, Phillip Rhodes, Mary Ellen Childs, Conlon Nancarrow.

    Selected commissions: Fromm Foundation, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Vienna Modern Festival, Paul Dresher Ensemble, American Composers Forum, Betty Freeman, Zeitgeist, Meridian Arts Ensemble, MANUFACTURE (Tokyo), Belgium’s Champ D’Action, ADEvantgarde / Bayerische Theaterakademie (Munich), Electronic Music Midwest, Jerome Foundation, Harmida Trio.

    Recipient of the American Music Center’s Stephen Albert Award, Hincks Fellowship at Villa Montalvo Artist Colony, Jazz Society of Southern California Prize, 2005 2nd place emsPrize from Electronic Music Stockholm, Stanford’s 2003 Gores Award for Teaching Excellence.

    Performances include: Darmstadt New Music Courses, ICMC, Festival Spaziomusica, Young Nordic Music Festival, Sonic Circuits Hong Kong, SEAMUS, Southeastern Composers League, SIGGRAPH, the American Composers Orchestra’s OrchestraTech, Piano Spheres, Northwestern University New Music Marathon, the College Music Society, BONK Festival, Borges Festival in France, UNYAZI Festival South Aftrica, Time Canvas and TRANSIT Festivals in Belgium, the Essl Museum in Vienna, NIME at IRCAM in Paris, and the Kennedy Center.

    Papers include Experience Music Project’s Popular Music Studies conference, an article in New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century.

    Additional fields of interest include sound-sculpture design, jazz performance, collaborations with neural artists, animators, architects, florists, choreographers, laptop DJs. Recordings released on Innova, Tzadik, SEAMUS, & Capstone. Taught at Mississippi State University, Carleton College, and the University of California, San Diego.

  • Giancarlo Aquilanti

    Giancarlo Aquilanti

    Senior Lecturer in Music

    BioStudied composition with Paolo Ugoletti, Glenn Glasow, Wayne Peterson, and Jody Rockmaker.

    Numerous compositions, including songs for voice and various combinations of instruments, several orchestral, choral and band pieces, string quartets, and the operas La povertà, Lot’s Women, and Oxford Companions.

    Recipient of the Walter J. Gores award for excellence in teaching (2003-04), Stanford's highest award.

  • George Barth

    George Barth

    Billie Bennett Achilles Director of Keyboard Programs and Professor (Teaching) of Music

    BioSpecial fields: piano and fortepiano, 18th- through 20th-century performance practice, rhetoric and music, the piano music of Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Brahms, Ives, and Bartók. Studied with Jon Barlow, Malcolm Bilson, and John Kirkpatrick.

    Appearances as recitalist, as soloist with orchestra, and as musicologist throughout the U.S. and Central Europe.

    NEH Fellow, 1989.

    Publications: Understanding Beethoven: The Mind of the Master (CD-ROM for Oxford/Stanford/Yale Alliance for Lifelong Learning, 2002); The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style, 1992; articles and reviews in Early Music, Early Keyboard Studies Newsletter, Humanities, Hungarian Quarterly, Music & Letters, Music Library Association Notes, New Grove Dictionary II.

    Recitals: Old First Concerts with Miriam Abramowitsch, mezzo soprano (San Francisco, 2002); Gallery Concerts with Tamara Friedman, fortepiano (Seattle, 2001); Mozart Concertos with the St. Lawrence String Quartet (Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, 2000); Trinity Concerts (Berkeley, 1999); Concerts on the Fringe (Berkeley Festival, 1996); San Francisco Early Music Society (1996). Presenter: Humanities West Symposium Beethoven: Resonant Genius (2003); First International Carl Czerny Symposium (Edmonton, 2002); Juilliard School’s International Symposium on Performing Mozart’s Music (1991); Westfield Center’s Bicentenary Humanities Symposium on Mozarts Nature, Mozarts World (1991); Ira Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, SJSU (1991).

    Recordings: Beethoven Cello Sonatas with Stephen Harrison, cello (Alliance for Lifelong Learning, 2002), Music & Arts, Boston Public Radio.

    Lecturer for Stanford Continuing Studies, 2001 (Beethoven’s Cello Sonatas); 1998 (Beethoven Quartet Cycle); Stanford Series in the Arts, 1993 (Bartók).

  • Jonathan Berger

    Jonathan Berger

    Denning Family Provostial Professor
    On Leave from 10/01/2023 To 06/30/2024

    BioJonathan Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
    Jonathan is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 winner of the Rome Prize.
    He was the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA, now the Stanford Arts Institute) and founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology
    Described as “gripping” by both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, “poignant”, “richly evocative” (San Francisco Chronicle), “taut, and hauntingly beautiful” (NY Times), Jonathan Berger’s recent works deal with both consciousness and conscience. His monodrama, My Lai, toured internationally. The Kronos Quartet's recording was released by Smithsonian/Folkways. His opera, The Ritual of Breath is the Rite to Resist will be performed at Lincoln Center in July 2024.
    Thrice commissioned by The National Endowment for the Arts, Berger’a recent commissions include The Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations, Chamber Music Society, Lincoln Center, and Chamber Music America.
    Upcoming commissions include a new work for the Kronos Quartet.
    In addition to composition, Berger is an active researcher with over 80 publications in a wide range of fields relating to music, science and technology and has held research grants from DARPA, the Wallenberg Foundation, The National Academy of Sciences, the Keck Foundation, and others.
    Berger is the PI of a major grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to study how music and architecture interact to create a sense of awe.

  • Karol Berger

    Karol Berger

    Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts, Emeritus

    BioKarol Berger (Ph.D. Yale 1975) is the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts, Emeritus at the Department of Music, as well as an affiliated faculty at the Department of German Studies, and an affiliated researcher at the Europe Center. A native of Poland, he has lived in the U.S. since 1968 and taught at Stanford since 1982. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, and Stanford Humanities Center. In 2011-12 he has been the EURIAS Senior Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. In 2005-2006, he was the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. He is a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the American Musicological Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cracow), and a foreign member of the Academia Europaea. His Musica Ficta received the 1988 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society, his Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow the 2008 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award of the Mozart Society of America, and his Beyond Reason the 2018 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society. In 2011 he received the Glarean Prize from the Swiss Musicological Society and in 2014 the Humboldt Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

  • Terry Berlier

    Terry Berlier

    Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of Music

    Bio“Terry Berlier makes conceptual art of unusual intelligence, humor and sensitivity to the impact of materials.”—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

    I am an Associate Professor of Art and an interdisciplinary artist teaching classes primarily in sculpture. I acknowledge that Stanford University occupies the unceded lands of the Muwekma Ohlone Nation, and honor the ancestral and ongoing relationships between the Muwekma Ohlone and these territories. I acknowledge that I am a settler on these lands with an obligation to humility; gratitude; and contributions to Indigenous rematriation and sovereignty, wellness and well-being, and the collective struggle against colonization and oppression.

    Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the evolution of human interaction with queerness and ecologies. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. This results in sculptures that are kinetic and sound based, and multi-media installations. She emphasizes the essential roles played by history, cultural memories, and environmental conditions in the creation of our identities. Using humor, she provides tools for recovering and reanimating our faltering connections with self, queerness, nature, and society. Interweaving movement, sound, and interaction as a metaphor for both harmonious and dissonant interactions, Berlier acts as an archaeologist excavating material objects to challenge our understanding of progress and reveal how history is constructed within a cultural landscape.

    Recent exhibitions include the Yerba Buena Center for Arts, Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Catherine Clark Gallery, Southern Exposure, Contemporary Art and Spirits in Osaka Japan, Arnoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery at Stanford University, Montalvo Arts Center, Weston Art Gallery, Babel Gallery in Norway, Richard L. Nelson Gallery, Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, Kala Art Institute Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Natural Balance in Girona Spain and FemArt Mostra D’Art De Dones in Barcelona Spain. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, the Zellerbach Foundation Berkeley, Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellow at Stanford University, Recology San Francisco, Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest Hungary, Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco, California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund and the Millay Colony for Artists. Her work has been reviewed in the BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and in the book ‘Seeing Gertrude Stein’ published by University of California Press. Her work is in several collections including the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland Ohio, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin Germany.

    She received a Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art from University of California, Davis and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Terry Berlier is an Associate Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University where she has taught since 2007.

  • Marina Bosi-Goldberg

    Marina Bosi-Goldberg

    Adjunct Professor

    BioMarina Bosi started her career as musician, performing and teaching at the Venice National Conservatory of Music, Italy, and spending about two years as a chargée de recherche at IRCAM, Paris, where she completed her thesis in Physics. She is currently Consulting Professor in the Music Department at Stanford University and is also a founding member and director of the Digital Media Project, a non-profit organization that promotes successful development, deployment, and use of Digital Media. Previously, Dr. Bosi was Chief Technology Officer of MPEG LA®, a firm specializing in the licensing of multimedia technology; VP-Technology, Standards and Strategies at Digital Theater Systems (DTS); was part of the research team at Dolby Laboratories that developed AC-3 (aka Dolby Digital) and where she also led the MPEG-2 AAC (the core coding technology used in Apple's iTunes, etc.) development for which she received the ISO/IEC 1997 Project Editor award; DSP Engineer at Digidesign where she designed and implemented real-time DSP modules for Sound Designer II (the precursor of Pro Tools). Dr. Bosi has been actively involved in the development of standards for audio and video coding and for managing digital content, contributing to the work of ANSI, ATSC, DVD Forum, DVB, ISO/IEC MPEG, SDMI, and SMPTE. A past President of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), Dr. Bosi is a Fellow of the AES served the AES in various capacities including as a member of the Board of Governors, as VP of the Western Region USA and Canada, and as Chair of the San Francisco Section. Dr. Bosi is a member the Technical Committee on Audio and Electroacoustics of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ASA.

    Dr. Bosi received the AES Silver Medal Award in recognition of outstanding achievements in the development and the standardization of audio coding, video coding, and secure digital rights management. She received the AES Board of Governors Award twice: for her co-chairmanship of the 96th AES Convention and again for her co-chairmanship of the 17th AES International Conference, the first scientific international conference dedicated to the topic of high quality audio coding. She also has received several awards for her scholarship from both the French and Italian governments.

    A graduate of Stanford Business School’s “Stanford Executive Program”, Marina holds several patents and publications and is author of the acclaimed textbook “Introduction to Digital Audio Coding and Standards” (Kluwer/Springer December 2002). Marina is currently Treasurer-Elect and Board member of the AES and is a member of the Scientific Council of ISSNAF.

  • Chris Chafe

    Chris Chafe

    Duca Family Professor

    BioChris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In 2019, he was International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies The University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, and Edgard-Varèse Guest Professor at the Technical University of Berlin. At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he has pursued methods for digital synthesis, music performance and real-time internet collaboration. CCRMA's jacktrip project involves live concertizing with musicians the world over. Online collaboration software and research into latency factors continue to evolve. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music reaches audiences in sometimes novel venues. An early network project was a simultaneous five-country concert was hosted at the United Nations in 2009. Chafe’s works include gallery and museum music installations which are now into their second decade with “musifications” resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD’s. Recent work includes the Earth Symphony, the Brain Stethoscope project (Gnosisong), PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China and Sun Shot played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland.

  • Christopher Costanza

    Christopher Costanza

    Artist in Residence, Music

    BioFor over three decades cellist Christopher Costanza has enjoyed a varied and exciting career as a soloist, chamber musician, and teacher. A winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and a recipient of a prestigious Solo Recitalists Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Costanza has performed to wide critical acclaim in nearly every state in the U.S., and in Canada, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Australia, New Zealand, China, Korea, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Romania, and Hungary. His summer festival appearances include the Marlboro, Yellow Barn, Santa Fe, Taos, Chamber Music Northwest, Seattle, Bay Chamber Concerts, Ottawa, and Bravo! Vail Valley festivals. Mr. Costanza is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he studied cello with Laurence Lesser, David Wells, and Bernard Greenhouse, and chamber music with Eugene Lehner, Louis Krasner, and Leonard Shure.

    Mr. Costanza joined the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ) in 2003, and tours and records extensively with that ensemble, performing over 100 concerts annually throughout the world. As a member of the SLSQ, he is an Artist in Residence at Stanford University, where he teaches cello and chamber music and performs a wide variety of formal and informal concerts each season, from the stages of the University’s concert halls to student dormitories and lecture halls. A strong proponent of contemporary music, Mr. Costanza works regularly with the world’s most notable composers, such as John Adams, Jonathan Berger, Osvaldo Golijov, Mark Applebaum, Pierre Boulez, George Tsontakis, Roberto Sierra, R. Murray Schafer, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, and Bright Sheng. As a student, he had the honor of studying Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” under the guidance of the composer.

    Mr. Costanza’s discography includes numerous chamber music and solo recordings on the Nonesuch, EMI/Angel, Naxos, Innova, Albany, Summit, and ArtistShare labels. In 2006, he received a Grammy nomination for his recording of major chamber works for winds and strings by Mozart. Additionally, several St. Lawrence String Quartet recordings on EMI have also been nominated for Juno awards. Mr. Costanza's recordings of the iconic Six Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach, along with his commentary on each suite, can be found on his website, costanzacello.com. In August, 2019, the SLSQ released its latest recording, of all six Op. 20 String Quartets of Haydn, in three formats: CD’s, on-line through streaming platforms, and limited-edition vinyl LP’s.

    Mr. Costanza is frequently heard on radio broadcasts worldwide, including the CBC in Canada, NPR in the United States, and on various European broadcasting networks. He is privileged to perform on an early 18th century Venetian cello, part of the Harry R. Lange Collection of Instruments and Bows at Stanford.

    In addition to his varied musical interests, Mr. Costanza is an avid long-distance runner and hiker. A self-described train enthusiast, he enjoys riding and exploring the passenger railways of the world. He is fascinated by architecture and seeks out innovative architectural offerings of each city he visits on tour. At home in California, he is passionate about cooking, focusing his attention on new and creative dishes which take advantage of the abundance of remarkable organic local produce. Mr. Costanza's wife, Debra Fong, is a wonderful violinist, and their daughter, Isabella, is a terrific violist currently studying at the Glenn Gould School in Toronto.

  • Laura Dahl

    Laura Dahl

    Senior Lecturer of Music

    BioPianist Laura Dahl is an active international performer and educator, appearing in venues including Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall and Stern Grove Festival, Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University, the Carmel Bach Festival, and the Henley Festival in Great Britain. A specialist in collaborative performance and chamber music, Dahl is the founder and artistic director of the A. Jess Shenson Recital Series at Stanford University, as well as Music by the Mountain, a chamber music festival in Northern California. Dahl is a member of the music faculty at Stanford University, where she teaches collaborative and solo piano, chamber music, art song interpretation, and diction. She has also taught at the New National Theatre Young Artists Training Program in Tokyo, Japan.

    Dahl’s education featured training on both coasts of the US and in Germany. She was the first musician to be named a German Chancellor’s Scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She lived two years in Germany, studying under pianist Phillip Moll, baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and pianist and composer Aribert Reimann. Dahl holds degrees from the University of Michigan School of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music, where she was a student of Martin Katz, Eckart Sellheim, and Margo Garrett. A graduate of San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Dahl served as Assistant Conductor for Western Opera Theater and was Associate Director of the San Francisco Boys Chorus. She has been a coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music and the University of Michigan Opera Theater. She was an invited fellow at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center for two years, in addition to studies at the Banff Academy of Singing (Canada) and the Music Academy of the West (Santa Barbara). Dahl was born and raised in the western states of Colorado and Montana.

  • Paul DeMarinis

    Paul DeMarinis

    Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of Music

    BioPaul DeMarinis has been working as an electronic media artist since 1971 and has created numerous performance works, sound and computer installations and interactive electronic inventions. One of the first artists to use computers in performance, he has performed internationally, at The Kitchen, Festival d'Automne a Paris, Het Apollohuis in Holland and at Ars Electronica in Linz and created music for Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His interactive audio artworks have been exhibited at the I.C.C. in Tokyo, Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. He has received major awards and fellowships in both Visual Arts and Music from The National Endowment for the Arts, N.Y.F.A., N.Y.S.C.A., the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and was awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica in 2006. Much of his recent work deals with the areas of overlap between human communication and technology. Major installations include "The Edison Effect" which uses optics and computers to make new sounds by scanning ancient phonograph records with lasers, "Gray Matter" which uses the interaction of flesh and electricity to make music, "The Messenger" that examines the myths of electricity in communication and recent works such as "RainDance" and "Firebirds" that use fire and water to create the sounds of music and language. Public artworks include large scale interactive installations at Park Tower Hall in Tokyo, at the Olympics in Atlanta and at Expo in Lisbon and an interactive audio environment at the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at The Exploratorium and at Xerox PARC and is currently a Professor of Art at Stanford University in California.

  • Elizabeth DiRenzo, PhD

    Elizabeth DiRenzo, PhD

    Associate Professor of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery (OHNS) and, by courtesy, of Music

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDr. Erickson DiRenzo's laboratory integrates research techniques from the basic and clinical sciences to improve the prevention and management of voice disorders.

  • Brian Ferneyhough

    Brian Ferneyhough

    The William H. Bonsall Professor in Music, Emeritus

    BioStudies with Ton de Leeuw, Amsterdam Conservatory, and Klaus Huber, Basel Conservatory.

    Awards: Mendelssohn Scholarship, 1968; Lady Holland Composition Award, Royal Academy of Music, 1967; Grand Prix du Disque, 1978 and 1982; Gaudeamus Music Week Prizes 1969 and 1970; Composition Stipend, City of Basle, 1969-71; Koussevitsky Prize 1978; Composition Stipend of Southwest German Radio, 1974-5; Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres, Paris 1984; Associate Royal Academy of Music, 1990; Royal Philharmonic Award for Chamber Music Composition, 1996; Fellow, Birmingham Conservatoire, 1995; Elected Member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1996; Fellow, Royal Academy of Music, 1998; Elected Corresponding Member of the Bayrische Akademie der Schönen Künste 2005.

    Activities: member of International Jury ISCM, 1980 (Finland) and 1988 (Hong Kong); member jury Gaudeamus Composition Competition 1983; member of International Reading Panel, IRCAM, 1993 & 1999; member of Kranichsteiner Preis Jury, Darmstadt, 1978-96; member of board, Perspectives of New Music 1995-present.

    Compositions featured throughout the world and at all the major European festivals of contemporary music. Compositions include: Fourth String Quartet, Bone Alphabet, Terrain, Allgebrah, Incipits, Unsichtbare Farben, String Trio. His opera Shadowtime was premiered as part of the Munich Biennale 2004, and has been taken to Paris, New York, Bochum and London 2004-5. In 2006, it was staged in Stockholm, Sweden. In October 2006, his orchestral piece Plötzlichkeit was premiered at the Donaueschingen Festival, Germany. His Fifth String Quartet was premiered in Witten and later played in the Aldeburgh and Salzburg Festivals.

    Publications: Collected Writings, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998; POETIK, and various articles and interviews.

  • Takako Fujioka

    Takako Fujioka

    Associate Professor of Music

    BioResearch topics include neural oscillations for auditory perception, auditory-motor coupling, brain plasticity in development and aging, and recovery from stroke with music-supported therapy.

    Her post-doctoral and research-associate work at Rotman Research Institute in Toronto was supported by awards from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Her research continues to explore the biological nature of human musical ability by examining brain activities with non-invasive human neurophysiological measures such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG).

  • Thomas Grey

    Thomas Grey

    Professor of Music, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThis book project will involve a series of essays about the status of "beauty" as an aesthetic and critical concept in musical discourse and practice from the later 18th century through the advent of musical "modernism," starting with the reception of Wagner in the 1880s to c. 1900. The project seeks to mediate between philosophical conceptions of beauty (Kant and British aestheticians of the 18th century), criticism (Eduard Hanslick, centrally), and compositional practice over the long 19thC.

  • Heather Hadlock

    Heather Hadlock

    Associate Professor of Music

    BioHeather Hadlock studies 18th- and 19th-century French and Italian opera, with a focus on changing norms for representing masculinity in opera on nineteenth century stages and in contemporary productions of classic operas. Her research repertoire encompasses Italian bel canto opera, Berlioz, Offenbach, operatic masculinities, opera in the age of its digital mediation, and divas and technology. She approaches operatic voices and performance through feminist theories of difference, vocality, and embodiment; gender and sexuality studies; and dynamics of adaptation between opera, literature, and video. She has directed Stanford's interdisciplinary Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and served on the Phiip Brett Award committee and board of the AMS LGBTQ Study Group. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Nineteenth-Century Music.

  • Stephen Harrison

    Stephen Harrison

    Senior Lecturer in Music

    BioStudied with George Neikrug, Andor Toth, Jr., Margaret Rowell, Eugene Lehner.

    Artistic Director, Ives Collective (2015-)
    Founding member, Ives String Quartet. Cellist (1998-2015)
    Founding member, Stanford String Quartet (1983-1997).

    Solo cellist, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

    Former principal, the Chamber Symphony of San Francisco, New England Chamber Orchestra, The Opera Company of Boston.

    Principal cellist, Mendocino Music Festival; Faculty coach, Emerging Artists Program, Mendocino Music Festival
    Faculty member, SoCal Chamber Music Workshop
    Cellist, Telluride Chamber Music Festival

    Former faculty/cellist at the Rocky Ridge Music Center, Centrum/Port Townsend (WA),

    Recordings for CRI, Laurel Records, New Albion, AIX Entertainment, Delos, Centaur, and Music and Arts Recordings of America.

  • Stephen Hinton

    Stephen Hinton

    Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies

    BioSpecial fields: aesthetics, history of theory, music of Weill, Hindemith and Beethoven.

    Stephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Professor of Music and, by courtesy, of German. From 2011-15 he served as the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. From 2006–2010 he was Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts. He is currently chairman of the Department of Music, having previously served in that position from 1997–2004 and 2000-2021. Before moving to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and, before that, at the Technische Universität Berlin. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik; Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks; the critical editions of Die Dreigroschenoper (with Edward Harsh) and Happy End (with Elmar Juchem) for the Kurt Weill Edition; Kurt Weill, Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, edited with Jürgen Schebera, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition); and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith’s Collected Works.

    He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history and theory, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. He has also served as editor of the journal Beethoven Forum. His book Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, the first musicological study of Kurt Weill’s complete stage works, won the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship in musical theater. Together with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, he produced the series of online courses called Defining the String Quartet focusing on the music of Haydn (2016) and Beethoven (2019).

  • Doug James

    Doug James

    Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, of Music

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsComputer graphics & animation, physics-based sound synthesis, computational physics, haptics, reduced-order modeling

  • Jarosław Kapuściński

    Jarosław Kapuściński

    Associate Professor of Music

    BioJarosław Kapuściński is an intermedia composer and pianist born in Poland. He studied piano and composition at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw and furthered his education in multimedia and intermedia art during doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a residency at Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada.

    Kapuściński presented his works at numerous gallery and concert venues worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, National Arts Centre in Canada, EMPAC, ZKM and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has also received awards for his intermedia art at the UNESCO Film sur l'Art Festival in Paris, the VideoArt Festival in Locarno, and the International Festival of New Cinema and New Media in Montréal.

    Apart from his career as a composer and performer, Kapuściński is also an educator. He has lectured internationally and held positions at institutions such as McGill University in Montreal and the Conservatory of Music at the University of the Pacific. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Composition at Stanford University.

  • Sasha Nicole Leitman

    Sasha Nicole Leitman

    Lecturer

    BioSasha Leitman is a musician, artist, teacher and inventor. She currently runs the “Max Lab - an Interface Prototyping Lab” at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) where she has collaborated and co-taught with Jonathan Abel, Trimpin, and the late Max Matthews. Currently, she teaches courses and workshops on Physical Interaction Design for Music and Interactive Sound Art Installations. She has been making musical instruments, new interfaces for musical expression and sound art installations for ten years.

  • Paul Phillips

    Paul Phillips

    Associate Professor (Teaching) of Music

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current project is the composition of a new work for 12 pianos that will be premiered in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on 9 & 10 February 2024. This commission follows an earlier project for 12 pianos that took place in 2022, when I conducted the premiere of "Fall and Fly" for 12 pianos at Flower Piano in San Francisco's Botanical Gardens. That composition by Benjamin Gribble will be repeated in the Grace Cathedral concert along with the premiere of my new work.

  • Lesley Robertson

    Lesley Robertson

    Artist in Residence in Music

    BioHaving celebrated 33 years with the internationally celebrated St. Lawrence String Quartet, Lesley Robertson (viola) is proud to make her life at Stanford University where along with her St Lawrence colleagues she directs the chamber music at the Department of Music. Ms. Robertson teaches viola, coaches chamber music, and also spearheads the SLSQ's Emerging String Quartet Program at Stanford and the SLSQ's annual Chamber Music Seminar. A graduate of the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, Ms. Robertson also holds a degree from the University of British Columbia where she studied with her mentor, Gerald Stanick. A founding member of the SLSQ, Ms. Robertson tours regularly, performing 100+ concerts worldwide per season (in Berlin, Florence, London, Paris, New York, Toronto, among others) but also nurtures close ties to the Stanford community performing in various classes, dormitories, laboratories, hospitals, and in Stanford's glorious Bing Concert Hall. She participated in the Marlboro Festival for several years and and toured with Musicians from Marlboro before co-founding the SLSQ. She has served on the jury of several international competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition and the Concours de Genève. Summer music festivals include Spoleto Festival USA, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Banff Festival, Festival of the Sound, Santa Fe Chamber Music, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Bravo Vail, Music@Menlo and more. Robertson plays on a viola (1992) made by fellow Canadian John Newton and a bow (2016) by Francois Malo.

  • Jesse Rodin

    Jesse Rodin

    Associate Professor of Music

    BioJesse Rodin strives to make contact with lived musical experiences of the Renaissance. Immersing himself in the original sources, he sings from choirbooks, memorizes melodies and their texts, and recreates performances held at weddings, liturgical ceremonies, and feasts. As Director of the Josquin Research Project (josquin.stanford.edu), he uses digital tools to explore a large musical corpus. As director of the ensemble Cut Circle (cutcircle.org), he works with world-class singers to animate Renaissance music.

    Rodin is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation; the Université Libre de Bruxelles; the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; and the American Musicological Society. For his work with Cut Circle he has received the Prix Olivier Messiaen, the Noah Greenberg Award, Editor’s Choice (Gramophone), and a Diapason d’Or.

    He is the author of "Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel" (Oxford University Press, 2012), editor of a volume of the L’homme armé masses for the New Josquin Edition (2014), and co-editor of "The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music" (2015). His articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, Acta Musicologica, and other major journals. A recent essay in Early Music tackles the longstanding problem of the Josquin canon, classifying all 346 pieces somewhere attributed to Josquin in descending order of confidence.

    His forthcoming monograph offers a new theory of how fifteenth-century polyphonic music happens in time. Drawing on his experiences as a scholar and performer, Rodin argues that composers activated a new collection of compositional building blocks to create a powerful and imaginative range of musical experiences (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

    Cut Circle performs internationally. With the Belgian label Musique en Wallonie, the ensemble recently embarked on a complete recording of Josquin's music; the first album appeared in November 2023. Cut Circle has also published recordings devoted to two riveting anonymous masses of the fifteenth century (2021), the complete songs of Johannes Ockeghem (2020), the late masses of Guillaume Du Fay (2016), and music in the Sistine Chapel in the time of Josquin (2012). A short film titled "Sounds of Renaissance Florence" recaptures the soundscape of fifteenth-century Italy. A disc of songs and motets by Josquin is scheduled for release soon.

    A passionate teacher, Rodin has led seminars, workshops, and masterclasses at institutions such as Princeton University, the Schola Cantorum (Basel, Switzerland), the University of Vienna, and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France).

    At Stanford Rodin directs the Facsimile Singers, in which students develop native fluency in old musical notation. He has organized symposia on the composer Johannes Okeghem, medieval music pedagogy, and musical analysis in the digital age. In addition to undergraduate and graduate music courses, he teaches a class on late-medieval feasting that marries art, music, poetry, and politics with hands-on experience in the kitchen.

  • Stephen Sano

    Stephen Sano

    Professor Harold C. Schmidt Director in Choral Studies and Professor (Teaching) of Music

    BioStephen M. Sano, Professor at Stanford University’s Department of Music, assumed the position of Director of Choral Studies in 1993. At Stanford, Dr. Sano directs the Stanford Chamber Chorale and Symphonic Chorus, where he has been described in the press as “a gifted conductor,” and his work as “Wonderful music making! ... evident in an intense engagement with his charges: the musicians responded to this attention with wide-eyed musical acuity.” Other reviews have lauded, “It is difficult to believe that any choral group anywhere is capable of performing better than the Stanford chorus under the direction of Stephen M. Sano.”

    Dr. Sano has appeared as guest conductor with many of the world’s leading choral organizations, including in collaborative concerts with the Choirs of Trinity College and St John’s College, Cambridge; the Joyful Company of Singers (London); the Choir of Royal Holloway, University of London; the Kammerchor der Universität der Künste Berlin; and the Kammerchor der Universität Wien (Vienna). He often appears as guest conductor of the Peninsula Symphony Orchestra in its collaborative concerts with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus, and has served on the conducting faculty of the Wilkes University Encore Music Festival of Pennsylvania. He has studied at the Tanglewood Music Center and is in frequent demand as a master class teacher, conductor, and adjudicator in choral music. To date, he has taught master classes and conducted festival, honor, municipal, and collegiate choirs from over twenty states, as well as from England, Austria, Germany, Canada, Australia, and Japan.

    On Stanford’s campus, Dr. Sano’s accomplishments as a leader and educator have been recognized through his appointments as the inaugural chair holder of the Professor Harold C. Schmidt Directorship of Choral Studies and as the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He was also the recipient of the 2005 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. Dr. Sano's recordings with the Stanford Chamber Chorale have appeared three times on the Grammy Awards preliminary ballot in the category "Best Choral Album." His choral recordings can be heard on the ARSIS Audio, Pictoria, and Daniel Ho Creations labels.

    Outside of the choral world, Dr. Sano is a scholar and performer of kī hō‘alu (Hawaiian slack key guitar), and an avid supporter of North American taiko (Japanese American drumming). As a slack key artist, his recordings have been nominated as finalists for the prestigious Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award and the Hawaiian Music Award. His recording, "Songs from the Taro Patch," was on the preliminary ballot for the 2008 Grammy Award. Dr. Sano’s slack key recordings can be heard on the Daniel Ho Creations and Ward Records labels.

    A native of Palo Alto, California, Dr. Sano holds Master’s and Doctoral degrees in both orchestral and choral conducting from Stanford, and a Bachelor’s degree in piano performance and theory from San José State University. He has studied at Tanglewood Music Center and with Mitchell Sardou Klein, William Ramsey, Aiko Onishi, Alfred Kanwischer, Fernando Valenti, and Ozzie Kotani.

  • Elizabeth Schumann

    Elizabeth Schumann

    Billie Bennett Achilles Director of Keyboard Programs and Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Music

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAs a concert pianist, I deeply value the rich traditions of classical music. My passion lies in blending this artistry with scientific insights from neuroscience to biomechanics. This isn't solely about music; it's about applying lessons about optimal practice and peak performance to life's broader canvas. Through my research, I strive to evolve musical training, paving the way for the next generation of dedicated and resilient performers.