Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska

As a historically-informed music theorist, I aim to incorporate culture into music analysis and to analyze music to better understand culture. Part of this project involves investigating the musical landscapes of the past to reconstruct the experiences of historical listeners. My recent work investigates how composers in the age of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven adapted the style of hymns in opera and instrumental music, and how their intended audiences might have interpreted these sacred allusions in secular contexts. In a current project, I study how the embodied knowledge of dance influenced the perception of symphonic minuets in late-eighteenth-century Vienna.

My research has received awards from the Center for Latin and Iberian Music (2014), the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic (2015), the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, the Music Theory Society of New York State (2016), and the Center for Music Theory Pedagogy (2017).

“The Romanesca as a Spiritual Sign in the Operas of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,” in Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera, ed. Gregory J. Decker and Matthew Shaftel. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)

 “The Rule of the Octave in First-Year Undergraduate Theory: Teaching in the Twenty-First Century with Eighteenth-Century Strategies,” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 31 (2017): 113–34.

“Interactions between Topics and Schemata: The Case of the Sacred Romanesca,” Theory and Practice 41 (2016): 47–80.(2016): 47–80.

 “Keys to the Analysis of Musical Italianism: Rhetorical Figures and Galant Schemata in Nebra’s and Jerusalem’s Masses,” Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review 1 (2015): 28-53.