Harvard University

Alumna, Music

About

I work on musical performance and related criticism over the long eighteenth century, from the reception of Lullian opera in the late seventeenth century to the height of the popularity of French grand opera in Paris in the early nineteenth century. My particular interests are discourses of difficulty and failure in musical performance, teratology, noise metaphors in musical writing of the French Enlightenment, musical performance in the novels of Denis Diderot, musical aesthetics and criticism in the articles of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, and studies of musical disability. My secondary interests include the history and historiography of French musicology. My recent research has focused on writing and the stigma of difficulty in the theoretical treatises of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and defects of learning and understanding in the musical life and thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. My dissertation research centers on actresses and dancers at the Paris Opéra in the early decades of the eighteenth century, including the reception of Marie Pélissier, Marie Sallé, Marie Anne de Cupis de Camargo, and Catherine Nicole Le Maure, as well as the women who sang major operatic roles for Rameau. The dissertation also traces common threads between the critique of actresses and the critique of Jansenism in the early eighteenth century.