People | Faculty | Martha Feldman

Martha Feldman

Appointments:

Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College

Education:

Ph.D., Music History and Theory, University of Pennsylvania, 1987

Contact:

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

Photo: Kathleen Karn

Martha Feldman is a cultural historian of European vernacular musics, ca. 1500-1840.  Her projects have explored social and political phenomena, artistic production, the senses and sensibilities of listeners, the interplay of myth, festivity, and kingship, and the figure of the musical artist.  Her first monograph was City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (1995, winner of the Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth-Century Society in conjunction with the Centre for Reformation Studies), which dealt with madrigals as part of the civic culture of Renaissance Venice.  Feldman has extended her Renaissance interests to the music of Renaissance courtesans in conjunction with graduate students, culminating in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited 2006, winner of the Ruth A. Solie Award of the AMS).  In 2007, after teaching seminars on opera, myth, and history, opera, carnival, and kingship, she published an extended study of opera seria, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy, as a manifestation and refraction of changing notions of sovereignty in the course of the later eighteenth century.  Currently Feldman is working on two books on the castrato as an index of European cultural change between 1560 and 1913.  The first is The Castrato in Nature (forthcoming from University of California Press), based on her Bloch Lectures at Berkeley in fall 2007, which investigates different relationships of castrati to nature, non-nature, and innate kinds. The second is The Castrato’s Tale, dealing with play of myth and narrative in castrato autobiography. Her work has been funded by the AAUW, the NEH, the ACLS, the American Philosophical Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation.  In 1998-99 she held an invited year-long position as a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, and in 2001 was awarded the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association for outstanding work in musicology.

Recent Courses Taught

  • “Petrarchan Wit and Musical Culture” (2004)
  • “Opera, Myth, History, 1724-1780” (2004)
  • "The Castrato in Nature: Body and Voice" (2006)
  • Proseminar: European Music, 1450-1600 (every two years)
  • Proseminar: European Music, 1700-1800 (every two years)

Selected Works

  • The Castrato in Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)
  • “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, 2008, forthcoming)
  • Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
  • The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-cultural Perspectives, co-edited with (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
  • "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