Music History

My interdisciplinary research explores the historical agency of music as a site of human transformation, including music and spirituality, the interrelation of music and social spaces, mapping and musical practices, and the poetics of the natural world. My creative work also engages these themes, most recently in a book of poems and illustrations entitled A Book of Hours.

I edited Arvo Pärt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and I am a co-contributor to Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Oxford Companion to Music and Medievalism (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the journals 19th-Century Music, Journal of Musicological Research, and altrelettere. My recent editorial work includes Letters from Cairo, and the editorial board for the journal Elements of Music Since 1945 (Cambridge University Press). Some of my other interests include languages (Swedish, Italian and Arabic), playing my cello, and flying.

At the John J. Cali School of Music, I teach undergraduate history and graduate seminar special topics. Before joining the faculty at Montclair State University I was a visiting faculty member at Wellesley College.

Laura Dolp holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University.

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.

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.

Drake Andersen is a composer, improviser and scholar whose work explores how social and technological forces shape musical performance. Current areas of research include twentieth-century experimental music, virtual scores, and open-source software communities. Recent and upcoming publications appear in Organised Sound, Perspectives of New Music, and Music Theory Online, and include investigations of democratic processes in open-source music software development communities, technological mediation in the music of Pauline Oliveros, and Earle Brown’s encounters with minimalist aesthetics. As a composer, his music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe by artists and ensembles including Jenny Lin, Mivos Quartet, and Contemporaneous. He also designs software for musical performance, which he has presented internationally at conferences including the International Computer Music Conference and the International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (TENOR). He holds degrees from the CUNY Graduate Center, the Manhattan School of Music, and Macalester College.

Maja Cerar is a violinist, musicologist and multimedia creator. She earned her Master of Arts, Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Historical Musicology at Columbia University with a dissertation on Schubert’s late string quartets, advised by Profs. Walter Frisch and Joseph Dubiel. She is a member of the Associate Faculty of the Music Performance Program at Columbia University, where she teaches chamber music and individual lessons. She has also taught undergraduate and graduate music courses at Columbia University, Fordham University, Rutgers University and Brooklyn College, CUNY. Ms. Cerar’s performance repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the present, and her stage experience, besides solo and chamber music, includes performances with live electronics as well as theater and dance productions. She has a continuing interest in new music and has worked with composers Sebastian Currier, Beat Furrer, György Kurtág, Tania León, Alvin Lucier, Katharine Norman, Morton Subotnick and John Zorn, as well as many emerging New York composers. She has also premiered and recorded numerous works written for and dedicated to her.

David Salkowski is a musicologist whose work explores issues of aesthetics, religion, and community formation, particularly in Russia, the Russian diaspora, and Southeastern Europe. He received his PhD in musicology from Princeton University in 2021, where he was a Graduate Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion. His dissertation, “Music for an Imagined Liturgy: Rethinking the Sound of Orthodoxy in Late Imperial Russia,” is based on extensive archival research in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, and was supported by a grant from the Fulbright Foundation. He has presented this research internationally, in both English and Russian, and his publications appear in Twentieth Century Music and the edited volume Sacred Contexts in Secular Music of the Long Nineteenth Century (Lexington, forthcoming). Dedicated to the intersections of performance and the academic study of music, Salkowski collaborated with the Princeton University Chamber Choir to stage forgotten works by the Russian émigré composer Arthur Lourié in 2016. At the Cali School of Music, Salkowski teaches online as an instructor of American Music.