MIT's Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium Series presents:
Cosmogony and Music, The Banquet Song of Iopas in Virgil's Aeneid.
Evan MacCarthy, Assistant Professor of Musicology, West Virginia University.
About the Speaker
Evan A. MacCarthy is assistant professor of music history in the West Virginia University School of Music. He received an A.B. in Classics and music from the College of the Holy Cross, and earned a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of fifteenth-century music and music theory, late medieval chant, German music in the Baroque era, as well as late nineteenth-century American music. He is writing a book on the intersections of music, pedagogy, and the revival of classical literature across the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century, focusing on the different spheres of humanistic and scholastic learning at Italian courts, cathedrals, and universities. The book explores how and why the surviving sources of Italian music theory were written, studied, and circulated, offering new new insight into the contemporary readers of these important texts. He is also producing an edition and first-ever translation of Ugolino of Orvieto’s Declaratio musice discipline (written c. 1435) for Brepols Press. He has served on the music faculties of Harvard University (where he was the Harvard College Fellow in music from 2010 to 2012), College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University. In 2012-13, he was the Committee for the Rescue of Italian art (CRIA) Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. Recently he has been awarded grants from the West Virginia Humanities Council, the Big XII Faculty Fellowship Program, the Lila Wallace - Reader's Digest Lecture Program, and the WVU Faculty Senate Research Grant Program. He is active as a singer, recently serving as the bass section leader of the Holy Cross Schola Cantorum under the direction of James David Christie. He is presently the director of the WVU Collegium Musicum, a performing ensemble specializing in music before 1800.
