Faculty: Musicology

Tamara Levitz
Professor, Graduate Center
(Ph.D., Eastman)



Ph.D./DMA Program in Music, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016  212-817-8590 tlevitz@gc.cuny.edu

Tamara Levitz is a musicologist who specializes in transnational modernism, with a focus on the music of Cuba, France, Germany, French West Africa, and the United States. She has devoted her research to composers like Ferruccio Busoni, John Cage, Alejandro García Caturla, Luigi Nono, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and Kurt Weill, and to 1960s popular music, the Beatles, and contemporary rap francophone. In her classes and work, she explores twentieth-century music from the perspectives of transnational dialogue; compositional practice; visual representation; recording technology and the music industry; performance; social, political, and colonial history; aesthetics; and relationship to dance and bodily movement. Her discussions are informed by the discourses of critical, cultural, queer, and postcolonial theory, philosophy, historiography, performance studies, dance history, and ethno/musicology. She is currently completing a monograph on Stravinsky’s Perséphone, and working on a second book project on Haunted Melodies: Colonial Encounters in 1930s France.   

Representative Publications

“Resisting mestizaje: The Silence of the Abakúa in Alejandro García Caturla’s Manita en el suelo” [in progress]

 “The Aestheticization of Race: Imagining the Dogon at the Musée du quai Branly,” The Musical Quarterly 89, Special Issue on “Music and Identity”, eds. Annegret Fauser and Tamara Levitz, forthcoming 2008.

“Annegret Fauser’s Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair,” H-France, available online at http://www.h-france.net, spring 2006.

“Syvilla Fort’s Africanist Modernism and John Cage’s Gestic Music: The Story of Bacchanale,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 1, issue on “Music, Image, Gesture,” ed. Bryan Gilliam (January 2005): 123-50.

“Yoko Ono and the Unfinished Music of ‘John&Yoko’: Imagining Gender and Racial Equality in the Late 1960s,” in Impossible to Hold: Women, Culture and the Sixties, eds. Lauri Umansky and Avital Bloch (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 217-40.

“The Chosen One‘s Choice,” in Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 70-108. [article on Le sacre du printemps]

“Review Essay on Marta Savigliano’s Angora Matta,” Echo 6, no. 1 (Fall 2004).  Online at http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume6-issue1/reviews/levitz.html.

“Kurt Weills Identität als deutsch-jüdischer Komponist vor 1933,” in Amerikanismus/Americanism: Die Suche nach kultureller Identität in der Moderne, eds. Hermann Danuser and Hermann Gottschewski (Schliengen: Argus, 2003), 221-45.

“Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Musical Theater by W. Anthony Sheppard; and Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts by Daniel Albright,” Notes 58, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 556-60.  [Eva Judd O’Meara Award of the Music Library Association, 2003]

“Most German of the Arts by Pamela Potter,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 176-86.

“In the Footsteps of Eurydice: Jaques-Dalcroze's Staging of Gluck's Orpheus und Eurydice in Hellerau Germany, 1912,” Echo 3, no. 2 (Fall 2001).  Online at http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/Volume3-issue2/levitz/levitz1.html.

 “Either a German Or a Jew: The German Reception of Kurt Weill's Der Weg der Verheißung,” Theater 30, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 97-105.

“Brian Cherney: des mémoires au-delà du silence,” in Présence de la musique québécoise: Vingt-deux portraits instantanés (Montréal, 1999), 23-27.

“Oper als Zauberspiegel: Reflexionen über Busonis Arlecchino,” in Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Institutes für Musikforschung (Fall 1997): 117-48.

Teaching New Classicality: Ferruccio Busoni's Master Class in Composition. Bern: Peter Lang, 1996.

“Junge Klassizität zwischen Fortschritt und Reaktion: Ferruccio Busoni, Philipp Jarnach und die deutsche Weill-Rezeption,” in Kurt Weill Studien I (Stuttgart: Metzer, 1996), 9-38.

“Erziehung zum Menschentum: Ferruccio Busoni's Junge Klassizität und die Schweiz,” in Klassizistische Moderne, ed. Felix Meyer (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1996), 219-229.

“Von der Provinz in die Stadt: Die frühe musikalische Ausbildung Kurt Weills,” in A Stranger Here Myself: Kurt Weill-Studien, eds. Kim H. Kowalke and Horst Edler (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1993), 107-142.