Erica Levenson | University of Michigan (original) (raw)

I am Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My primary area of research is baroque music, with an emphasis on the transnational circulation of opera, popular songs, and musical theater. In my current book project, Playful Enemies: French Song, Satire, and Spectacle in Early Eighteenth-Century England, I examine the Anglo-French political and socio-economic landscape of the 1710s–1740s through the lens of the French musical and theatrical invasion of the London stage. I have additional research interests in historical performance practice and the history of sampling in contemporary American popular music.

I have presented my research at both national and international conferences, including the International Conference on Baroque Music, the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, among others. My research has been published in the journals Eighteenth-Century Music and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture as well as in the edited volume Music, Myth, and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Boydell and Brewer Press). Much of my research is archival-based, and has been supported by the American Musicological Society Jan LaRue Travel Fund and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

As a professor at the University of Michigan, I teach courses on a wide range of topics, including on global music studies, historical performance practice, musical borrowing, and music, gender, and sexuality. As a harpsichordist and organist, I welcome opportunities to combine performance with research and teaching. I first pursued my interests in early music performance and interdisciplinary scholarship as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley where I received a Bachelor of Arts in music and English literature. I hold a PhD in Musicology from Cornell University.

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Books by Erica Levenson

by Katherine Butler, Samantha Bassler, John MacInnis, Jason Stoessel, Tim Shephard, Férdia J Stone-Davis, Erica Levenson, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Jamie Apgar, Sigrid Harris, and Aurora Faye Martinez

Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely ... more Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely offering material for musical settings, authoritative tales from classical mythology, ancient history and the Bible were treated as foundations for musical knowledge. Such myths were cited in support of arguments about the uses, effects, morality, and preferred styles of music in sources as diverse as theoretical treatises, defences or critiques of music, art, sermons, educational literature, and books of moral conduct. Newly written literary stories too were believed capable of moral instruction and influence, and were a medium through which ideas about music could be both explored and transmitted. How authors interpreted and weaved together these traditional stories, or created their own, reveals much about changing attitudes across the period.

Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques, and practices. Moreover, music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallels to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political, and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium for ridicule. This collection provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond.

Papers by Erica Levenson

Eighteenth Century Music

This article examines how French vaudeville tunes circulated in England through both theatrical p... more This article examines how French vaudeville tunes circulated in England through both theatrical performances and French-language textbooks (or ‘grammars’). My central concern is to consider how audiences in London – who had little exposure to the rich satirical and cultural connotations that these tunes had acquired over years of performance in Paris – might have been able to grasp their significance within staged works performed by visiting Parisian troupes between the years 1718 and 1735. I suggest that in tracing the transmission of tunes from France to England, scholars should consider a wider range of print sources, since vaudevilles had a social life extending beyond the plays in which they were performed. To this end, I focus on analysing vaudevilles found in French ‘grammars’. The pedagogical nature of these sources explicitly puts on display how French culture was translated for an English readership. By comparing the tunes found in grammars with plays that used the same tu...

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

by Katherine Butler, Samantha Bassler, John MacInnis, Jason Stoessel, Tim Shephard, Férdia J Stone-Davis, Erica Levenson, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Jamie Apgar, Sigrid Harris, and Aurora Faye Martinez

Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely ... more Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely offering material for musical settings, authoritative tales from classical mythology, ancient history and the Bible were treated as foundations for musical knowledge. Such myths were cited in support of arguments about the uses, effects, morality, and preferred styles of music in sources as diverse as theoretical treatises, defences or critiques of music, art, sermons, educational literature, and books of moral conduct. Newly written literary stories too were believed capable of moral instruction and influence, and were a medium through which ideas about music could be both explored and transmitted. How authors interpreted and weaved together these traditional stories, or created their own, reveals much about changing attitudes across the period.

Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques, and practices. Moreover, music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallels to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political, and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium for ridicule. This collection provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond.

Eighteenth Century Music

This article examines how French vaudeville tunes circulated in England through both theatrical p... more This article examines how French vaudeville tunes circulated in England through both theatrical performances and French-language textbooks (or ‘grammars’). My central concern is to consider how audiences in London – who had little exposure to the rich satirical and cultural connotations that these tunes had acquired over years of performance in Paris – might have been able to grasp their significance within staged works performed by visiting Parisian troupes between the years 1718 and 1735. I suggest that in tracing the transmission of tunes from France to England, scholars should consider a wider range of print sources, since vaudevilles had a social life extending beyond the plays in which they were performed. To this end, I focus on analysing vaudevilles found in French ‘grammars’. The pedagogical nature of these sources explicitly puts on display how French culture was translated for an English readership. By comparing the tunes found in grammars with plays that used the same tu...

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture