MUSICOLOGY FACULTY
FACULTY BY AREA
Bands
Brass
Choirs
Composition and Technology
Conducting
Jazz Studies
Keyboard
Music Education
Musicology
Orchestras
Percussion
Strings
Theory
Voice, and Opera
Woodwinds
Lisa Jenkins
Marie Sumner Lott
Marica S. Tacconi
Charles Youmans
Lisa Jenkins teaches undergraduate world music. She holds a B.A. in Music from Penn State, a M.A. in Musicology from the University of Michigan and is currently completing her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, "Celtic Connections: Celticism and the Impact of Globalization on Contemporary Scottish Music and Culture," examines Celtic music in light of the new global aesthetic and describes its impact on local culture in Scotland. Her work is based on research at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, Scotland as well as fieldwork focusing on the annual Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, Scotland. She has presented papers at conferences in the United States and Canada. Her performing experiences in world music include Highland bagpipes, bodhran, Javanese gamelan, ko-tsuzumi and taiko drumming. Further research interests include Japanese music, globalization, and folk music revivals.
Marie Sumner Lott joined the Penn State faculty in 2008, after completing a Ph. D. in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. Her doctoral dissertation investigates string chamber music in Europe from about 1830 to 1880 with a special emphasis on the varying social roles of chamber music in private settings throughout the period, illuminating the relationships between contemporary innovations in the publication, performance, and composition of music from Schubert to Brahms. In addition to nineteenth-century music, her research interests include music and visual art in the early twentieth century, the impact of music recording on the composition and performance of chamber music in the twentieth century, and women composers and women’s roles in musical production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Sumner Lott has presented her research both at home and abroad at conferences such as the 14th International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music in Manchester, England; Instrumental Music and the Industrial Revolution in Cremona, Italy; and the annual meetings of the Rocky Mountain and the New York-St. Lawrence chapters of the American Musicological Society. She has published articles and reviews in the Journal of Musicological Research, MLA Notes, and the journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections. Her work on the string quartets of Carl Czerny was included in a recently published book of essays edited by David Gramit.
Marica S. Tacconi is Associate Professor of Musicology and Executive Director of the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities. She joined the School of Music faculty in 1998 and teaches undergraduate and graduate music history. A native of central Italy, she holds a B.A. from Williams College and a Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University.
Tacconi's dissertation, Liturgy and Chant at the Cathedral of Florence: A Survey of the Pre-Tridentine Sources (Tenth-Sixteenth Centuries), is a broadly interdisciplinary study of more than seventy liturgical manuscripts. It is based on two years of research in Florence, supported by Yale University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her dissertation received a 1997-98 AMS 50 Fellowship Award from the American Musicological Society.
Tacconi's research interests extend beyond music history to include the art, culture, and politics of medieval and Renaissance Italy. In 1997 she co-organized a manuscript exhibition at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana of Florence (I libri del Duomo di Firenze. Codici liturgici e Biblioteca di Santa Maria del Fiore, secoli XI-XVI), for which she was also the co-editor of the catalogue. She has presented papers at conferences in the United States, Italy, England, Denmark, and Belgium and is the author of numerous articles, essays and catalogue entries.
Tacconi was the recipient of a 2002-03 Villa I Tatti post-doctoral fellowship from the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. During her year in residence in Florence, she worked toward the completion of a monograph, Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
In 2001 she received a Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching from the College of Arts and Architecture. Also a performer, she has appeared as both pianist and harpsichordist and as director of several early music ensembles.
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Charles Youmans teaches undergraduate and graduate music history. Before joining the School of Music faculty in 1999, he taught for three years at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.
Youmans's research deals with musical aesthetics in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria. His book Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2005), examines the influence of Goethe, Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the music and programs of Strauss's tone poems. Further research interests include musical hermeneutics, Gustav Mahler, and the reception of Eduard Hanslick's formalism. Articles by Youmans have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Music, The Musical Quarterly, the Journal of Musicology, and elsewhere. He has presented papers at conferences in the United States and Germany.
Trained as a classical guitarist, Youmans has studied interpretation with John Sutherland, Christopher Parkening, and David Russell. He holds B.M. and M.M. degrees in guitar performance from the University of Georgia, and the A.M. and Ph.D. in musicology from Duke University.
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