GMA & Student Representatives
Graduate Musicology Association (GMA):
Presidents: Yishai Rubin and John Cowan
Vice President: Elizabeth Hile (Ph.D.) and Kristin Shaffer (M.A.)
IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization Representative:
Lucy Rissmeyer
JSoM Student Representative Committee:
Peyson Weekley
Active Students
Miguel Arango Calle is a Ph.D. student in musicology at Indiana University. He received a B.M. in Guitar Performance from the University of Costa Rica and an M.M. in Music Theory from the University of Arizona. Miguel’s research focuses on the operas of Mozart and his contemporaries. Currently, Miguel is working as a co-editor for the Indiana Theory Review and as an editorial assistant for the website Mozart: New Documents. In his free time, Miguel likes to play tennis.
Chelsey Belt is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology from Woodstock, IL. She received her M.M. in musicology from Boston University and B.M.E. (music education) from Illinois Wesleyan University. Her dissertation project, “Re-Stringing the Lyre: Monody and the Performance of Poetry in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy,” addresses the influence of poetic performance practices on the development of notated solo song. Her broader interests in music orality and literacy include instrumental traditions and maritime culture. She performs on a variety of early bowed strings including a recently commissioned lira da braccio, and writes for Harmonia, WFIU’s nationally syndicated early music radio program. A proud supporter of the graduate labor movement, Chelsey is a founding member of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition-United Electrical Workers. Her hobbies include textile crafts, gardening, and birding with her husband Scott.
Natalie Benefield is an M.A. student in musicology from Fort Worth, Texas. She received her B.A. in Music from Texas Christian University, where she studied the cello and French. Natalie’s research interests include the sacred music of the Baroque era, the music of J.S. Bach, and instrumental music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque. An avid cellist, Natalie enjoys playing both modern and Baroque cello in a variety of settings. Outside of music, she enjoys cooking, cheering on TCU athletics, and tending to her animal crossing island.
Jaime Carini, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, is an Ostrom Fellow at Indiana University Bloomington, where she pursues dual doctorates in the Jacobs School of Music: the Ph.D. in musicology and the D.M. in organ performance and literature. She earned a B.M. in piano performance and music theory at The University of Tulsa, where she learned to love musicology by studying under Charpentier expert John Powell. In November 2020, she participated in a tribute to Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, delivering remarks on Ostrom’s legacy and her contributions to the world. Jaime is a frequent contributor to Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, reviewing books such as the first English edition of The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi by Abramo Basevi (December 2015). She participated in a public organ recital, performed for PipeDreams Live! at Indiana University, which aired nationwide on American Public Media in October 2016. An ardent collaborator, Jaime is a member of the Élan Ensemble, based in Washington, DC. One of her most memorable musical experiences was playing ballet class for Mark Morris and his dance company.
Rachel Cisneros is a Ph.D. student in musicology.
Molly Covington is a Ph.D. student in Musicology with a Bachelor of Music in music theory from the University of North Texas. Her research interests include philosophies of musical meaning, exoticism in classical opera, and Afrofuturism. She plays classical guitar and enjoys practicing various forms of dance.
John Matthew Cowan is a Ph.D. student in musicology from Stirling, NJ. He holds a B.A. in Music Studies from the University of South Florida (‘21) and an M.M. in Musicology from the University of Miami (‘23). Cowan’s primary research interests include European musics of the long eighteenth century with particular attention to Mozart, United Statesian jazz musics in the early-to-mid twentieth century with particular attention to Sinatra, and all things musicological-historiographical. His master’s thesis, “Monostatos: Ethnoracial Representation and Cultural Politics in Die Zauberflöte,” explicates the historical and contemporary contexts of the titular character’s Black and Turkish identities in response to recent trends in production—a topic on which he presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. While at UM, Cowan served in the Graduate Student Association as Senator for the Department of Musicology and a Co-Chair of the Committee for Music and Arts. He attempts to play the piano and flute, works as a cantor and organist for Catholic liturgies, and enjoys broadening his mind by learning about other disciplines via YouTube (when he really should be reading about his own).
Nicole Cowan is a M.A. in Musicology/MLS student from Grapevine, TX. She earned her undergraduate degree in Flute Performance with a minor in French and Francophone Studies at Texas Christian University. Her research interests include the transition between the classic and romantic eras, how music is used to tell stories, and the intersection between music and emotion. In her free time, she enjoys watching college football, getting lost in the stacks of the Cook Music Library and cozying up with a good book.
Drew Diekman is an M.A. student in musicology from Rochester, NY. He graduated from Belmont University with a bachelor’s degree in Commercial Piano Performance. His primary research interests focus on genre and stylistic development; from 19th century chamber music, to 20th century folk music revivals, to 21st century electronic micro-genres developing in online spaces. In his free time, Drew is an avid reader and home cook, as well as a massive fan of the Buffalo Bills.
Patrick Domico is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology. Originally from Memphis, TN, he completed a B.A. in Music from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His dissertation concerns the musical culture of Russia Abroad in Europe and American from the 1920s-40s. Through the close examination of the music and prose writings of Nikolay Medtner and Igor Stravinsky, he argues that the study of interwar musical modernism has been heavily distorted by the failure to properly account for the extensive contributions of anti-modernist figures (who often probed the same aesthetic problems and shared in similar musical values as their modernist counterparts). This exclusion of anti-modernist music and discourse from the history of modernism has furthermore made it difficult for scholars to properly account for anti-modernism modes of thinking and composition frequently exhibited by celebrated modernist composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg. By placing Medtner and Stravinsky in dialogue, he makes foundational contributions to the study of Russian emigre music and issues substantial correctives to the literature on Stravinsky and musical modernism. His main hobbies at the moment include tea and various games.
Maria Fokina is a Ph.D. student in musicology. She received her B.A. (Hons.) in Music from the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Russian music, Russian and Soviet ballet, and the music of Ottorino Respighi.
Jacqueline Fortier is a Ph.D. student in musicology at Indiana University. She is originally from Quebec City, Canada. She studied at Laval University where she received a B.A. in Musicology (2017) as well an M.A. in Musicology (2019), under the direction of Dr. Serge Lacasse. Her master’s thesis focused on an analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s vocal performance in relation to the narratives in his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly. In 2018, she was awarded the OICRM Master’s Research grant. She presented her work at the 2019 IASMP-Canada conference. Her current research interests include West Coast hip hop and history, global hip hop in the 21st century as well as music and trauma.
Benjamin Fowler is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology from Helena, MT and Richland, WA. He holds degrees in piano performance from the University of Montana and University of South Carolina and a M.M. In musicology from Northwestern University. His research interests are music of Mexico, eighteenth-century keyboard music, and American Music. As a recipient of the Tinker Foundation Grant for pre-dissertation research in Mexico, he spent time at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música archives looking at nineteenth-century Mexican piano music and opera.”
Monika Franaszczuk is a Ph.D. student in musicology.
Samantha Hark is a Ph.D. student in Musicology from Long Island, New York. She received a B.A. in Music with Departmental Honors from Stony Brook University. A few of her research interests include obscure internet culture, the cyclical nature of human experience with music, music and trauma, and music and magic.
While her interests are wide-ranging, Sam is most dedicated to the general practice of Public Musicology.
Luke Foster Hayden is an M.A. student studying musicology originally from Portage, Indiana, but has resided in Bloomington since 2014. Informed by his experience teaching general music in public schools, Hayden uses a cross-discipline approach to historical music research. His research interests are centered around Danish music, specifically Danish language opera. Aside from Danish music, Hayden is also interested in music that could be considered periphery or “other.” Outside of his musicological work, Luke is an avid cyclist and home cook. He owns a sizable collection of cast iron cookware.
Elizabeth Hile is a Ph.D. student in musicology from Everett, WA. She holds two Master’s degrees: a Master of Music in composition from Central Washington University (where she also earned her Bachelor’s in composition) and a Master of Arts in music history from the University of Idaho. Her musicological and performance interests are varied and numerous: the most prominent include orchestration in the 19th and 20th centuries (especially works of Gustav Mahler), programmatic music, chamber music composition, and historical performance practice on the traverso. A lifelong fascination with James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan canon has also propelled her to pursue several research and creative projects related to draft texts and musical interpretations of the story. When not practicing, researching, or writing, Elizabeth enjoys working on pen and ink illustrations of birds, making sushi, beach combing the Pacific coast, and visiting with her pet dove, Scottie.
Joshua Joy is an M.A. student in musicology and also MLS.
Anne Lake (B.Mus. in Flute Performance, Bowling Green State University, MLS, IU) is a Ph.D. student in musicology with a minor in film studies. She has presented at Music and the Moving Image (May 2014, NYU), the Seventh International Conference on Music Since 1900 / Lancaster Music Analysis Conference (2011, Lancaster, England) and Soundtrack Cologne (2010, Köln, Germany). She has also been closely involved in the Greggiati project since 2015. Her research interests include film music, gender studies, digital humanities, 18th-19th c. music collectorship, and online collaborative webseries, and she hopes to dissertate on the scores of the recent glut of superhero films.
Mingfei Li is currently a third-year PhD student in Musicology at Indiana University. Her research interests are late-eighteenth-century operas, twentieth- and twenty-first-century East Asian and Asian American music, and music and trauma. In May 2022, she presented a paper titled “The ‘Hungry Animal’: Papageno and Other Basso Buffo Characters by Emanuel Schikaneder” at the Mozart Colloquium, a seminar devoted to Mozart scholarship hosted by the British Library in London. She also presented a paper titled “‘Ten Years of Turbulence’: Music and Musicians during the Chinese Cultural Revolution” at the conference on Music/Sound Through the Lens of Trauma: Methodology, Theory and History, held at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in July. She will present the same paper “‘Ten Years of Turbulence'” at the Joint Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, and Society for Music Theory in New Orleans in November 2022. Li holds a Performance Diploma and a Master of Music degree in Piano Performance from the Jacobs School of Music, where she received Associate Instructorship, Artistic Excellence Award, and Irving & Lena Lo Scholarship.
Bret McCandless is a Ph.D. student in musicology.
Sarah Adele Kirkman McDonie is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology with a minor in media studies from St. Louis, Missouri. She studied music education at DePauw University and completed her Master of Arts in Musicology here at Indiana University. Her research interests include exploring the intersections of cybernetics and experimental art, emphasizing questions of agency. Sarah and her husband also own a custom music composition business, Opus One, LLC, and for the 2021-2022 academic year, she is the student manager for Project Jumpstart, part of the Jacobs School of Music’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Career Development. When she is not doing professional work, Sarah enjoys scuba diving, good food, running, swimming, and going on adventures with her husband, Brian, and Manford, their charismatic Shetland sheepdog.
Meredith K. Michael is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology with a minor in comparative literature. She previously earned a M.M. in musicology from Baylor University and a B.A. in piano performance from Georgetown College. Her research interests include relationships between music and literature, 19th century French music, music historiography and pedagogy, and moon operas. She is in the process of writing a dissertation exploring how music shaped modern mythologies of outer space in the 20th century. Meredith currently works in the music library’s digitization lab and as the production assistant for the podcast Weird Studies. In her spare time, she can be found accumulating way too many library books, watching cartoons, and hanging out with her two cats.
Samuel Motter is an Indiana native who holds a degree in jazz saxophone from the Jacobs School and is currently pursuing both an M.A. in musicology and an M.M. in historical performance at the same institution. Sam has been active as a performer and teacher in the Indiana music scene for the past decade, having collaborated with artists including the Bloomington Bach Cantata Project, Brother Sponge, Sir Deja Doog, Michael Spiro, and Wayne Wallace, appearing on the Grammy-nominated album Canto América. He has played the cornetto since 2018, blending his passions for improvisation, wind playing, and history. Sam’s research interests include repertoire, context, and performing practice of the 16th and 17th centuries. In his free time, Sam enjoys spending time in the great outdoors.
Grace Pechianu is a 3rd-year Ph.D. student in musicology from Highland Park, Illinois. She holds a M.M. in musicology and a B.M. with concentrations in musicology and violin performance from Northwestern University. Grace is interested in the area where music and literature intersect. Her thesis, “Thomas Mann’s ‘Doktor Faustus’ and the Post-War Concerto,” investigates twentieth-century representations of the Faust legend in programmatic and instrumental music. Grace presented her research on musical compositions related to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus at the American Musicological Society’s Midwest chapter meeting in September 2018. She was awarded the American Bach Society’s Frances Brokaw Grant for an internship at the Riemenschneider Bach Institute in the summer of 2018. Her current research concerns eastern European radio music during the Cold War. Grace will present her paper “War of the Waves: Radio Free Europe’s Crusade for Freedom in Early Socialist Romania” at the 2021 AMS national meeting.
Tess Rhian is a musicology Ph.D. student from Carmel, New York. She recently earned a B.A. in music from Muhlenberg College, with concentrations in vocal performance and music history. Her undergraduate honors thesis focused on Lully’s Armide and its function as allegorical propaganda for king Louis XIV. She has also studied Bartók’s ethnographic approach to creating a new Hungarian national music regarding the incorporation of Roma musical traditions. Tess is interested in researching the ways in which “othered” peoples and their musical traditions have been represented in the dominant cultures that surround them. In her free time, she enjoys learning new music, reading, and practicing yoga.
Lucy Rissmeyer is a student in the M.A. in Musicology/MLS program. They received a BM in Piano Performance from Ithaca College in 2023, where they studied with Dmitri Novgorodsky. They’re an avid fan of 20th and 21st century music and love listening to new composers. Outside of music they enjoy hiking and experimenting in the kitchen.
Yishai Rubin is a PhD student in musicology from Jerusalem, Israel. He holds an MA in musicology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where his thesis focused on Liturgical Church music in medieval Flanders. Beyond his ongoing work on medieval music, his research interests are wide-ranging, among them Renaissance polyphony, the music of J. S. Bach and its reception by subsequent generations, and film music. Yishai’s musicological path continues and joins his long-lasting activity as a performing pianist, which included a BMus degree from Tel-Aviv University and MMus from Boston’s New England Conservatory, as well as many concerts worldwide and several years of piano teaching, which sparked a special curiosity in the history of piano pedagogy. When not reading, studying or playing the piano, Yishai is likely to be found hunched over his current jigsaw puzzle.
Sarah Sabol of Ovid, New York, began her Ph.D. in musicology in Fall 2020. Her current research interests include the Italian madrigal, the sixteenth-century motet, modal theory, the Anglican choral tradition, and the intersection of class structure and music. She previously earned an M.A. in musicology from McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) and a B.M. in organ performance from Rice University (Houston, Texas). She enjoys outdoor activities – kayaking, bicycling, and hiking – as well as spending time in the kitchen and struggling through the crossword puzzle.
Kaylee Simmons is a musicology Ph.D. student at Indiana University. Her research primarily centers on 17th-century Dutch music with broader applications in gender studies and historically informed performance of the early modern period. In this regard, she recently presented her work at the AMS/SMT 2020 conference. Her other interests include representations of gender in popular music of the 1990’s, as well as the role of the Occult in 19th-century religious music of North America. Kaylee has a masters degree in Musicology from Northwestern University and background as vocalist with specialty in early modern repertoire. She continues to perform, and informs her vocal practices with her musicological research. When she is not engaged in musical activities, Kaylee works as a freelance painter. When possible, she enjoys hiking back in her scenic home state, Utah, and traveling to her home away from home, the Netherlands. She also spends an unconscionable amount of time doting over her cat, Adonis.
Matthew Van Vleet is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology from Columbus, Ohio. He holds a B.A. in Music and a BS in Physics from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research interests include drum and bugle corps and music in the American military. Additionally, his doctoral minor is in cognitive science and he is a member of the Music and Mind Lab at Indiana University studying music cognition and perception. He has contributed program notes and lectures for IU Opera productions of Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Mason Bates’s The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, and the upcoming production of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi (February 2020).
Lindsay Weaver is a Ph.D. student in musicology from Sandy, Utah. She received her M.S. in Library Science from Indiana University and a B.A. in Music from Brigham Young University. Her research interests predominantly center on nineteenth-century French opera and music culture in Paris, musical theater, and reception history. Her other interests include codicology, collectorship, and digital humanities. She has previously presented at the American Harp Society, the Mountain-Plains Chapter of the Music Library Association, and the International Association of Music Libraries. In her free time, she enjoys thinking about fiction, information security, and pretending not to play video games.
Peyson Weekley is an MA student in musicology. He is also pursuing an MLS in music librarianship. Originally from western Pennsylvania, he earned bachelor’s degrees in music and political science from Ohio University. Peyson’s research focuses on the instrumental music of Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and their contemporaries, as well as the concert music of Gershwin. He is more broadly interested in issues of style and genre, musical semiotics, music and rhetoric, music and politics, and the relation of music to broader aesthetic movements. In his free time, Peyson enjoys reading, hiking, and playing tennis.
Kitt Westerduin is a Ph.D. student in musicology. They study early modern women’s music making, plucked strings, early Latin American music, and gravitates towards themes of enclosure and connection.
Travis Whaley is a Ph.D. Candidate in musicology with a minor in organ performance from Cary, North Carolina. His dissertation, “Organ Tablature and Conceptions of Music in the Seventeenth Century,” investigates notation as a tool and explores how using letter tablature affects musical issues like performance, genre, improvisation, pedagogy, and publishing. He completed an M.M in organ performance under Chris Young and an M.A. in musicology at Indiana University in 2018. He holds bachelor’s degrees in piano performance, composition, and German from Virginia Tech, where he studied piano with Tracy Cowden and composition with Kent Holliday. He holds an Honors Baccalaureate Diploma for his undergraduate thesis, “Beethovens Kompositionsvorgang in der Waldstein Sonate, Op. 53.” In the summer of 2014, Travis competed in the International Bach Competition held in Leipzig, Germany. His other areas of research include studies in the compositional process and American country music. Travis is an avid NASCAR fan and comic book reader.
Nathan Wright is a Ph.D. student in musicology from Fishers, Indiana and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Anderson University. His current academic interests include music in Renaissance culture and intersections of music and philosophy. He has contributed program notes to the University Singers and Summer Chorus ensembles. In addition to his research interests, Nathan is an avid choral singer and participates in several choral ensembles within the Jacobs School of Music.
Leanna York is a Ph.D. student in musicology. She holds an M.A. in musicology from Butler University and a B.A. in string pedagogy from Maranatha Baptist University. Her research interests include the examination of humanistic rhetorical practices surrounding musical polemics in early modern England and specifically the reconciliation of Antiquity sources derived from opposed cultural scenes. Leanna also loves teaching and enjoys spending time with her students while drinking tea and talking pedagogy.