Musicology
Dr David Gramit
PhD (Duke)
Professor, Musicology
Dr David Gramit has taught musicology at the University of Alberta since 1991. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of music, especially in 19th century Austria and Germany. Areas of particular interest include the lied, Schubert, reception history, and the history of musical practice.
He is the author of Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848 (University of California Press, 2002), editor of Beyond The Art of Finger Dexterity: Reassessing Carl Czerny (University of Rochester Press, 2008) and has served as editor of the Journal of Musicological Research. Among his other publications are articles and reviews in journals including Nineteenth Century Music, Music and Letters, Musical Quarterly, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and chapters in books including the Cambridge Companion to Schubert and the Cambridge Companion to the Lied, The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700-1914, and Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms.
In addition to teaching courses for non-majors, core undergraduate music history courses and the graduate proseminar in musicology, he has led seminars on topics including: Franz Schubert; the German lied; German musical culture and practice; exoticism in Western music; issues in local music history and the history of music in Edmonton; the composer as a category in Western music history; and recording technology and the experience of music
Dr Christina Gier
PhD (Duke)
Assistant Professor, Musicology
Christina Gier researches gender and music through a lens on identity and subjectivity. Her research and publications focus on different aspects of European and American early twentieth century music, and she teaches courses in European music history, music and gender, jazz history, film music, women in music, and American experimentalism, among other topics.
Dr Gier is currently working on a book project about the musical practices of American civilians and soldiers during the First World War and how songs sold as sheet music shaped ideas of identity, gender and race. Her focus on identity and subjectivity illuminates how song practices, regimented by the military and promoted by the sheet music industry, created the idea of Nation and “Other” through a myriad of semiotic markers and emotive practices. The songs are positioned in relationship to government and journalistic discourse on the war, gender and the power of music as a fighting tool. Furthermore, she explores the connection of this musical practice to the discourses of race and the changing ideas of femininity, with respect to performers such as James Reese Europe and Elsie Janis. Her article on the First World War and American popular song is at Music and Politics.
She also writes about the modernist aesthetics of Alban Berg. Her publications on Berg’s interest in the Frauenfrage and his musical aesthetics are in Women in Music Journal, Journal of Musicological Research, and Musica Humana. In this project Berg’s reading notebooks provide insight into his personal ideas on current and historical literature and science, and specifically on gender discourse. Reading hundreds of authors from Goethe to Weininger, and Altenberg to Ibsen, his appreciation for literature and scholarship was broad and lends insight into his creative values. The relationship of these ideas to his musical composition is approached through a theory of intertextuality between music and language, founded in Julia Kristeva’s linguistics and theories of subjectivity.
Other areas of research interest include Hollywood film music (with an essay on Sunset Boulevard (1950) in Anxiety Muted: American Film Music in a Suburban Age forthcoming from Oxford University Press) and also P.J. Harvey and women blues singers.
Dr Mary Ingraham
PhD (Nottingham)
Associate Professor, Musicology
Dr Mary Ingraham received her doctorate in historical and analytical musicology from Nottingham University (UK) with a dissertation on Brahms's cantata Rinaldo under the supervision of Robert Pascall, and a Master of Arts in Musicology from the University of Victoria (Canada) for work on Brahms's solo Lieder. Her primary area of research is in the examination of the social and cultural context for music creation, with current research into issues of identity and cultural politics in 20thcentury Canadian opera.
Dr Ingraham is the author of two web-based projects for the Canadian Music Centre: Sound Progressions: Canadian Music in the 20th Century and Sound Adventure, an award-winning educational website for young learners. Her article on Brahms’ operatic ambitions was recently published in Ars Lyrica: Journal of the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations.
A former professional pianist, Mary is actively involved in the Canadian performing arts community as a Voting Member of the Canadian Music Centre, and Founding Director and Past President of the Piano Six Foundation. She is currently Associate Professor of Musicology in the Department of Music at the University of Alberta.
Brenda Dalen
PhD cand. (Yale)
Instructor, Musicology
(No biography available)
PhD (University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music)
Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in Music
Dr Jennifer Ronyak pursues research primarily in performance studies, investigating relationships between vocal performance and ideas in continental philosophy concerning language, music, and the conditions governing artistic communication. While she currently focuses on the nineteenth-century German Lied and German Romantic musical culture, her interests include choral music, American art music and issues in international pop music, as well.
Dr Ronyak's current book in progress, Singing the Self, examines the performance of art song in early nineteenth-century Germany, considering how the communicative practice of singing brought into question central concepts of autonomy and interiority in German thought. To date, her research has received the support of the Thomas Hampson Fund for Research in Classical Song, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Elsa T. Johnson Fellowship at the Eastman School of Music, and the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Fund; her article “‘Serious Play,’ Performance, and the Lied” is currently forthcoming in 19th-Century Music.
An accomplished song accompanist, Dr Ronyak also enjoys returning to the piano whenever possible. She will be teaching "The Lied as Genre and Idea" in Winter 2011.
(No biography available)