Music History

Beatriz Goubert Burgos biography to come soon.

Pianist David Witten has performed extensively in Europe, Russia and South America. As a 1990 Fulbright Scholar, he spent five months in Brazil. Witten has recorded piano music of various Latin American composers. Witten’s involvement in music has not been limited to performance. He is editor of Nineteenth-Century Piano Music: Essays in Performance and Analysis (Garland, 1997), which includes his landmark analytical study of the Chopin Ballades. Born in Baltimore, Witten studied at Peabody Conservatory and Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. His undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University led to a degree in Psychology. Later graduating with high honors from Boston University, he earned the DMA degree in piano performance. Witten is currently Coordinator of Keyboard Studies at the Cali School of Music at Montclair State University.

Elizabeth Frickey is a Ph.D. candidate and MacCracken Fellow studying musicology at New York University. Prior to her studies at NYU, she earned her master’s degree in musicology at Indiana University and her bachelor’s degree in music education from Florida State University. Her dissertation project examines the cultural, ecological, and political impact of community gardens and other NYC  greenspaces through the lens of music and sound. Elizabeth has presented her research in numerous national and international settings, including annual meetings of the Society for American Music; the American Musicological Society; the Society for Ethnomusicology; the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment; the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; the Music Studies and the Anthropocene Research Network; and the 2023 Music, Research, and Activism Conference held in Helsinki. Her writing has also been published in numerous forums including Jazz & Culture, the Journal of Jazz Studies, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and Journal SEAMUS.

Jeffrey Gall made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1988 – the first countertenor ever to sing at the Met. He sang Tolomeo in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, and in 1994 returned to the Met for Britten’s Death in Venice. He studied voice at the Yale School of Music with Blake Stern, and holds degrees in Slavic languages from Princeton and Yale Universities. He sang with such early music ensembles as the Waverly Consort and Pomerium Musices early in his career and then moved on to solo roles in Baroque and contemporary opera. He has sung principal roles at La Scala, Teatro San Carlo (Naples) and La Fenice in Italy; the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and the Salle Garnier in France; the Monnaie in Brussels; the Netherlands Opera; the Cologne and Frankfurt Operas in Germany; the Canadian Opera, as well as the Spoleto, Edinburgh, Innsbruck, Halle, Schwetzingen, and Bordeaux Festivals. In the United States he has sung at the San Francisco, Chicago Lyric, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Boston Operas, and has made many concert appearances at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York, as well as at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He has recorded for CBS, Harmonia Mundi, Erato, Nonesuch, Titanic and Smithsonian Records, and appears in the title role on the London video of Peter Sellars’ production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Prof. Gall has conducted clinics and master classes in both standard repertory and early-music techniques at music schools across the United States. In addition, he is a founding member of the Italian vocal ensemble Il Terzo Suono.

Oksana Nesterenko is a musicologist specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music and postcolonial studies. She earned a PhD in Music History and Theory at Stony Brook University in 2021. Her current book project, A Forbidden Fruit? Sacred Music in the USSR before its Fall, was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. The forthcoming book redefines the concept of contemporary sacred music and explores art music with religious
themes in Armenia, Estonia, Ukraine, and Russia. Dr. Nesterenko’s writing has been published in Perspectives of New Music, Yale Journal of Music & Religion, Musicology Now, the Claquers, and other publications. She is a host and a co-founder of Extended Techniques, a podcast and blog about contemporary music in New York.

Cara Turnbull is a musicologist specializing in music cognition and empirical musicology. She received her Ph.D. in music from Princeton University, where she held graduate fellowships in both the Program in Cognitive Science and the Center for Digital Humanities. She also has an M.A. in Music, Science, and Technology from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Music in Music Performance (double bass) and Sound Recording Technology from Ithaca College. Most recently, Cara’s research has focused on music-evoked imaginings, including daydreams and autobiographical memories triggered by music. She has presented research in this area at national and international conferences, including at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, and the Society for Music Theory.

Ivan Sturm bio to come soon.