Faculty: Musicology

Ruth Deford
Professor, Hunter College and the Graduate Center
(Ph.D., Harvard)

Music Department, Hunter College
ruth.deford@hunter.cuny.edu

Ruth DeFord is a specialist in Italian secular music and music theory of the Renaissance. She has edited works of Giovanni Ferretti and Orazio Vecchi, written articles for Studi musicali, Acta musicologica, Early Music History, Journal of Musicology, Journal of the American Musicological Society and Early Music, and contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Her current work focuses on Renaissance theories of rhythm.

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS: 

"The Mensura of Cut-O in the Works of Du Fay," Early Music 34 (2006), 111-36.

"On Diminution and Proportion in Fifteenth-Century Music Theory," Journal of the American Musicological Society 58 (2005), 1-67.

"Marenzio and the villanella alla romana," Early Music 27 (1999), 535-52.

"Zacconi's Theories of Tactus and Mensuration," Journal of Musicology 14 (1996), 151-82.

"Tempo Relationships between Duple and Triple Time in the Sixteenth Century," Early Music History 14 (1995), 1-52.

"The Influence of the Madrigal on Canzonetta Texts of the Late Sixteenth Century," Acta musicologica 59 (1987), 127-151.

"Musical Relationships between the Italian Madrigal and Light Genres in the Sixteenth Century," Musica disciplina 39 (1985), 107-68.

Orazio Vecchi, The Four-Voice Canzonettas, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 92-93 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1993).

Giovanni Ferretti, Il secondo libro delle canzoni a sei voci (1575), Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance 57-58 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1983).

"The Evolution of Rhythmic Style in Italian Secular Music of the Late Sixteenth Century," Studi musicali 10 (1981), 43-74.