GMA & Student Representatives
Graduate Musicology Association (GMA):
Presidents: John Matthew Cowan (Ph.D.) and Yishai Rubin (Ph.D.)
Vice Presidents: Elizabeth Hile (Ph.D.) and Kristin Shaffer (M.A./M.M.)
IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization Representative:
Lucy Rissmeyer (M.A./M.L.S.)
JSoM Student Representative Committee:
Peyson Weekley (M.A./M.L.S.)
Active Students
Miguel Arango Calle is a Ph.D. candidate 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.
April Balay is a 1st year PhD student in musicology originally from Durham, North Carolina. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Music Education from Campbell University (‘17) and a Master of Music in Music History from the University of South Carolina (‘22). She is a popular music scholar who is passionate about a variety of topics, including but not limited to, determining the link between retro and nostalgic musical styles in the popular music of times of collective cultural crisis from an American perspective, as well as music and trauma studies in conjunction, music streaming and data collection, sound studies, development of musical taste, the use of popular music in film, and the changes in hybridity in genre and form of popular music. Her most recent research project involved a musicological examination of music recommender systems used by music streaming services such as Spotify, and the playlist funnel (filter) derived from data tracked by these programs. April loves to collect vintage board games, make various attempts at knitting and crocheting, solve logic puzzles, rewatch her favorite shows, attend K-pop concerts, and take naps with her void kitty, Midnight.
Yael Beer is an M.A. student in Musicology. Originally from Queens, New York, they obtained their B.A. in Vocal Performance with a minor in Russian Studies from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Their research interests include music composed in the Theresienstadt ghetto during the Holocaust, and the development of Ashkenazi liturgical modes. In their free time, they enjoy knitting sweaters and playing the flute.
Chelsey Belt is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, writing her dissertation on the transmission and practice of solo song in early modern Italy. She received her M.M. in musicology from Boston University and B.M.E. (music education) from Illinois Wesleyan University. She currently resides in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, where she teaches music history at Illinois State and Illinois Wesleyan Universities.
Natalie Benefield is an MA/MLS student from Fort Worth, Texas. She received her B.A. in Music from Texas Christian University, where she studied the cello under Jesus Castro-Balbi and Juliette Herlin, as well as French. Natalie’s musical interests include symphonic literature of the 20th century, the development of the cello and its repertoire, and the intersections of sacred and Western art music. An avid cellist, Natalie maintains an active career playing and performing in both orchestral and chamber settings. When not in class or rehearsal, she can often be found behind the circulation desk of the William and Gayle Cook Music Library. Outside of music, Natalie enjoys cooking, cheering on TCU athletics, and keeping up with the New York Times daily crossword.
Abigail Byrd is a first-year Ph.D. student in musicology originally from Greenville, SC. She graduated from the University of Alabama in 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in music theory and a minor in liberal arts through the Blount Scholars Program. Her capstone project, “Queer Identity and Agency in the Production of the Japanese House’s In The End It Always Does,” explored how the collaborative dynamics between The Japanese House (Amber Bain) and their producers enabled sonic changes that allowed for a fuller, more authentic expression of Bain’s identity as a queer woman. Abigail is an active cellist and bassist, and her interdisciplinary performance and recording experiences inspire her diverse interests. Abigail’s research interests include sound studies, popular music analysis, organology, music production, contemporary Christian music, and ecomusicology. Her recent paper, “The String Instrument Industry and the Triple Bottom Line,” which explores the various environmental, economic, and ethical issues facing luthiers and factory-made string instruments, won the American Musical Instrument Society’s Frederick R. Selch Student Paper Award in 2024. Her husband, Jacob Glidewell, is also a first-year doctoral student at IU studying mathematics.
Kaitlyn Canneto (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Musicology at Indiana University, originally from the Jersey Shore. She received a B.A. in Music with minors in Political Science and Spanish from The College of New Jersey, and an M.M. in Music History from Temple University. Kaitlyn’s research primarily focuses on popular music of the Americas—including jazz, contemporary US pop, as well as Latinx pop—and its intersections with gender, sexuality, race, religion, and intimacy. She has given presentations at the International Meeting of IASPM and CMS Northeast. Her work has also been featured in Boston University’s Ampersand: An American Studies Journal in March 2023. Outside of academia, Kaitlyn enjoys cooking and spoiling her two cats, Richard and Truffle.
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 Frost School of Music (‘23). Cowan’s primary research interests include comic opera/operetta, 18th-century European music, Walter Kaufmann, borrowing, and all things musicological-historiographical. Cowan has presented on the topic of his Master’s thesis, “Monostatos: Ethnoracial Representation and Cultural Politics in Die Zauberflöte,” at multiple conferences. While at UM, he served in the Graduate Student Association as Senator for the Department of Musicology and a Co-Chair of the Committee for Music and Arts. At IU, Cowan served as Co-President of the Graduate Musicology Association and on the Executive Board of the University Gilbert and Sullivan Society; Cowan also works in Reference and Special Collections at the William and Gayle Cook Music Library. He thinks himself an unrealized baritenor and attempts to play the piano and flute.
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.
Carter Hammond is a student in the M.A. in Musicology/MLS program
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 and received her M.A. in Musicology from Indiana University Bloomington. Sam’s research interests include obscure internet culture, the cyclical nature of human experience with music, music and trauma, music and grief, and music and magic. While her interests are wide-ranging, Sam is most dedicated to the general practice of Public Musicology. She has presented her paper “As the Parish Was Perishing: A Theological Perspective on Black Musical Activism During the AIDS Crisis in the United States” at both Indiana University Bloomington’s Musicology Colloquium Series and Yale’s Graduate Music Symposium.
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 a student in the M.A. in Musicology/MLS program
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 a PhD candidate in Musicology with minors in Music Theory and Piano Performance. Her dissertation focuses on Emanuel Schikaneder and late-eighteenth-century German theater. She is currently serving as the Student Representative on the board of officers and directors at the Mozart Society of America. Li’s other research interests include music and trauma studies as well as nineteenth-century arrangements and transcriptions. Li has previously presented at the Mozart Colloquium, an international seminar devoted to Mozart scholarship; the national joint conference of AMS/SMT/SEM; and the international conference of “Music/Sound through the Lens of Trauma Studies.” Li holds a Master’s degree and a Performance Diploma in Piano Performance from the IU Jacobs School of Music, where she received a full scholarship, associate instructorship, Artistic Excellence Award, and the 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 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 Ph.D. 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, originally from Ovid, New York, is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology. 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). Sarah is currently interested in cultural aspects of music performance, production, and collection by Italian academies during the sixteenth century and primarily engages with motets, madrigals, and musical puzzles. She also focuses on the analytical features of this music, namely modal cadence theory. Another topic addressed in her research is the historiography of early modern music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sarah has recently presented her work at MedRen, AMS Midwest, the Newberry Library Graduate Student Conference, and the Sounding Habsburg Conference. She enjoys outdoor activities – kayaking, running, and hiking – as well as spending time in the kitchen and struggling through the crossword puzzle.
Kaylee Feller-Simmons is a musicology Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University. Her academic interests center on the everyday music of youth culture, a topic that she has explored regarding various centuries: from music and adolescent drug use in Holland’s Golden Age, to mother-daughter relationships at the Victorian piano, to 1990’s politics and the Spice Girl’s “Girl power!” movement. An early modernist at heart, her dissertation explores the intersection of 17th-century Dutch songbooks with historical conceptions of youth and gender. Beyond her affiliation with Indiana University, Feller-Simmons is an adjunct professor of musicology at Utah State University and serves as the Webmaster for the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society. She recently relocated to Chicago, where she lives with her incredibly smart and handsome husband, and adorable cat, Adonis. When she is not transcribing early modern Dutch lyrics, teaching, or mastering the web, Feller-Simmons enjoys singing with the Allice Millar Chapel Choir and hiking through mountains of the Rocky Mountain West.
Kristin Shaffer is a third-year Musicology M.A. and Vocal Performance M.M. dual-degree student from Tampa, Florida. She earned bachelor’s degrees in both voice performance and English from Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee where she graduated as the university’s distinguished performance graduate in 2022. Kristin’s research focuses on French, German, and English-language art song of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her current project explores the salon networks of Pauline Viardot around 1850, as well as Viardot’s engagement with the nineteenth-century musical album tradition. Other research interests include music and domesticity, women and music, and the intersection between music and literature. Since 2022, Kristin has worked as a professional chorister in Indianapolis where she regularly performs art song recitals. She is also a part-time news journalist at NBC KNBN NewsCenter1. In her free time, Kristin enjoys working with oil pastels, cooking comfort food, and shopping for antiques.
Alexandra Spees is an M.A. musicology student from the Indianapolis area. She received bachelor’s degrees from Butler University in Music History and German. Her musical interests lie in jazz music, American classical music, and ballet. Alex also has interests in public musicology, specifically programming for both orchestras and radio. In her free time, she enjoys reading, playing with her cats, and baking French patisserie.
Micah Torcellini is an M.A. student in musicology. He graduated from Patrick Henry College with a degree in Classical Liberal Arts with a Music minor. He originates from a farm in Eastford, Connecticut, the residence of his weather predicting duck, Scramble. He is especially interested in the intersection of music and other disciplines, both academic and handicraft, which he explores primarily considering early music. He contemplates how music relates to philosophy and theology while he tinkers with his harpsichords.
Matthew Van Vleet is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology from Columbus, Ohio. His dissertation, “Music on the March: Americanism, Veterans’ Organizations, and Drum and Bugle Corps in the Twentieth Century” explores the role that military veterans’ organizations such as the American Legion play in constructing and promoting Americanism in popular music, particularly in the competitive drum and bugle corps movement, a cornerstone of the American marching arts. He holds a B.A. in Music and a B.S. in Physics from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Additionally, his doctoral minor is in cognitive science and he has been a member of the IU Music and Mind Lab. He has contributed program notes and lectures for several IU Opera productions as well as numerous entries in “Musical Borrowing and Reworking: An Annotated Bibliography.” In his free time, Matt enjoys performing with various community bands, skateboarding, and playing with his corgi, Tuffy.
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 M.A. 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 eighteenth-century oratorio and humanism and music in early modern England. Leanna also enjoys teaching, making music in her church, and video chatting with her twin sister and tribe of nieces and nephews.