Martha Feldman and Lawrence Zbikowski receive named, distinguished service professorships

Martha Feldman and Lawrence Zbikowski photos

 

Cultural historian Martha Feldman has been named the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College and Lawrence Zbikowski, a leading music theorist and analyst, has been named the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Department of Music and the College.

Martha Feldman, Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College

Martha Feldman photo

Martha Feldman centers her scholarship on different vernacular music from 1500 to the present. Her wide-ranging scholarship has encompassed madrigals in the civic culture of Renaissance Venice; the music of courtesans and 18th-century opera as a manifestation and refraction of changing notions of sovereignty, myth and festivity; and the entanglements of voice with race, alterity, media, memory and historical practice.

Feldman has written and edited many books and monographs, including The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality (2019), co-edited with Judith T. Zeitlin; The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (2015); and Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (2007), which received the 2010 Gordon J. Laing Award of the University of Chicago Press. Among many honors and distinctions, she received the 2001 Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association and the 2009 Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.

Lawrence Zbikowski, Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Department of Music and the College

Lawrence Zbikowski photo

A leading scholar of music theory and analysis, Lawrence Zbikowski in his research applies recent work in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to questions of musical understanding. Topics he has explored include music and emotion, musical agency, music and movement and the ways musicians extend cognitive processes through interactions with instruments and each other.

His recent book, Foundations of Musical Grammar (2017), builds on research about fundamental aspects of human communication to explore how meaningful musical utterances are created. A prolific author, Zbikowski has published articles and chapters on music and dance, metaphor and music theory, conceptual blending and music, tone painting in 18th-century music and text-music relationships in early-19th-century song. In 2019, he received UChicago’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.

Read more about these professorships and the other faculty members across the university to receive this honor!