Elaine R. Fitz Gibbon is a historical musicologist with a focus on the intersections of experimental music and art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, through experiences of displacement, diaspora, and mobility. After training as a Germanist, she received her PhD in historical musicology with a secondary field in American Studies from Harvard University in 2024. Her dissertation explored the emergence of instrumental theater as a vehicle for social critique in the collaborative works of Mauricio Kagel and Ursula Burghardt in the mid-twentieth century, and the genre’s resurgence in the twenty-first century. Publications of her scholarly work have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Opera Quarterly, Current Musicology, the Paul Sacher Foundation’s Mitteilungen, and in the edited collection Material Cultures of Music Notation.
Publications:
“Reevaluating Political Musiktheater and Reversing Colonialist History: Mauricio Kagel’s Mare Nostrum (1975),” Journal of the American Musicological Society 77, no. 3 (2024): 769-822.
“Jennifer Walshe on Opera, Music Theater, and Collaboration: An Interview with Elaine Fitz Gibbon,” The Opera Quarterly 39, no. 3-4 (2024): 198-205.
“Crooked Plane(s): Friendship as Compositional Medium in the Labor e. V.’s 5-Tage-Rennen (1968),” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 37 (2024): 32-38.
“Ursula Burghardt – artista plástica judío-argentina-alemana / Ursula Burghardt – Jewish Argentine German Artist,” jewishlatinamerica: América Latina Judía/Latino-America Judaica/Jewish Latin America (blog). 28 August 2024. https://jewishlatinamerica.com/2024/08/28/ursula-burkhardt-artista-y-musica-judio-argentina-alemana-argentine-german-jewish-artist-and-musician/
“Encyclopaedias and Empty Staves: Re-reading Music in Hanne Darboven’s Quartett ›88‹.” Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription. Edited by Emily Payne and Floris Schuiling, 31-49. London: Routledge, 2022.
“Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969),” Current Musicology 107, no. 1 (2021): 29-61.
Translator, “Leon Cavallo’s Pagliacci and Modern-Realistic Opera by Hans Merian.” Puccini and His World. Edited by Arman Schwartz and Emanuele Senici, 273-290. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Co-translator with Emily Richmond Pollock, “Auditions: Four Texts by Bernd Alois Zimmermann,” The Opera Quarterly: Opera and the Avant-Garde 30, no. 1 (2014): 135-151.
Courses, Spring 2025:
Music 111: Listening to History
Music 225: Modernism and the Avant-Garde
Education:
PhD, Historical Musicology, Harvard University
MA, German Studies, Princeton University
BA, Music & German Studies, University of Pennsylvania