Martha Feldman

Appointments:

Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College

Education:

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1987

Contact:

Office: Goodspeed Hall 318
Phone: (773) 702-8697
Email: rore@uchicago.edu

Martha Feldman is a cultural historian of European vernacular musics, ca. 1500-1950, with a concentration on Italy. Her projects have explored the senses and sensibilities of listeners, the interplay of myth, festivity, and kingship in the realm of opera, issues of cinema, media, and voice, and the various incarnations of the musician as artist. Her work explores mediated relationships between social, political, and artistic phenomena. Her first monograph, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995; winner of the Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference in conjunction with the Centre for Reformation Studies), dealt with madrigals within the civic culture of Renaissance Venice. Feldman's Renaissance interests have extended to the music of Renaissance courtesans, with results published partly in conjunction with her graduate students in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited, Oxford, 2006; winner of the 2007 Ruth A. Solie Award of the American Musicological Society). In 2007, she published an extended book about 18th-century opera seria as a manifestation and refraction of changing notions of sovereignty and festivity during the latter half of the eighteenth century. That work, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy, won the Gordon J. Laing Award of the University of Chicago Press (2010) for the faculty book "published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction."

Currently on leave after completing a term as Chair of the Music Department, Feldman is completing a book based on her Ernest Bloch Lectures, six public presentations given at Berkeley in fall 2007 as the Visiting Bloch Professor of Music, on the castrato as an index of European cultural change between the mid-sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. Entitled The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (University of California Press), the book investigates different relationships of castrati to nature, non-nature, and innate kinds. A second book, provisionally called The Castrato Phantom: Encryptions and Voice, from Moreschi to Fellini, is the object of her 2012-13 residency as a Senior Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, about the afterlife of the castrato phenomenon in Rome.

Feldman’s work has been funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for Research in Venice, the American Association of University Women, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the American Musicological Society, The University of Chicago, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1998-99 she held an invited year-long position as a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. In 2010 she was a visiting professor at the Università degli Studi di Pavia at Cremona, Dipartimento di scienze musicologiche e paleografico-filologiche.  She has served on the boards of the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Opera Quarterly, Echo, the American Musicological Society, Opera Cabal, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Logan Arts Center.

Feldman was awarded the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association for outstanding work in musicology in 2001 and the Graduate Teaching Award of the University of Chicago in 2009. She is an Associate Faculty member in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (2005-), a Resource Faculty member in the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies (1995-), and Affiliated Faculty with the Center for Gender Studies (1995-).  In 2012, she will be inducted as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Recent Courses Taught

  • “Petrarchan Wit and Musical Culture” (2004)
  • “Opera, Myth, History, 1724-1780” (2004)
  • "The Castrato in Nature: Body and Voice" (2006)
  • "Composing Humans, 1760-1840" (2009, with James Chandler, English)
  • "Performing Voices: Material, Mediation, Technology, Theory" (2011)
  • Proseminar: European Music, 1450-1600 (every two years)
  • Proseminar: European Music, 1700-1800 (every two years)

Selected Works

  • The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds, Bloch Lecture Series (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)
  • “Moreschi and Fellini: Delineating the Castrato in Post-Unification Italy,” with Martina Piperno, VoiceXchange  Dec. 31, 2011
  • “Strange Births and Surprising Kin: The Castrato’s Tale,” in Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. Paula Findlen etc., afterword by Franco Fido (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)
  • Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007; corrected paperback edition 2011)
  • The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-cultural Perspectives, co-edited with (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006; corrected edition  2008)
  • "Music and the Order of the Passions," in Representing the Passions: Bodies, Visions, Texts, ed. Richard Meyer (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2003), pp. 37-67
  • "Authors and Anonyms: Recovering the Anonymous Subject in Cinquecento Vernacular Objects," in Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate van Orden, with foreword by Roger Chartier, Critical and Cultural Musicology (Garland Publishing Inc., 2000), pp. 166-99
  • "Staging the Virtuoso: Ritornello Procedure in Mozart, from Aria to Concerto," in Mozart's Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Neal Zaslaw (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 149-86
  • "L'opera seria e la prospettiva antropologica," Musica e storia 5 (1997): 127-51
  • City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995)
  • "Magic Mirrors and the Seria Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View," Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1995): 423-84