Rebecca Cypess
Musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her publications include Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy, as well as several edited volumes and over 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Cypess is the founder and director of the Raritan Players, a period-instrument ensemble that explores little-known repertoire and performance practices of the eighteenth century. She was the 2018 recipient of the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society for contributions to historical performance.
Clara de Courson
Clara de Courson est attachée temporaire d’enseignement et de recherche à Sorbonne Université. Elle est l’autrice de Diderot, La Religieuse (en collaboration avec Florence Lotterie, Atlande, 2022) et d’une thèse de doctorat consacrée à Diderot, à paraître aux éditions Classiques Garnier sous le titre : « Des voix confuses et lointaines ». Représentations acoustiques du discours chez Diderot.
Beverly Jerold
Formerly a keyboard performer, Beverly Jerold combined this skill-set with a study of sources from the early 16th century to 1900, which reveal a perpetual struggle by the elite to improve the performance standards imposed by a lack of our technology. Among her recent publications: Equal Temperament in the Eighteenth Century: The Ear versus Numbers (Brepols, in press); Disinformation in Mass Media: Gluck, Piccinni and the Journal de Paris, RMA Monographs (Routledge, 2022); The Complexities of Early Instrumentation: Winds and Brass (Brepols, 2015); Music Performance Issues: 1600-1900 (Pendragon, 2016); “Diderot (Part I) — Authorship and Illusion,” Music Theory & Analysis 1/1&2 (2014): 38-60; “Diderot (Part II) —Temperament and Expressive Intonation,” Ibid., 2/1 (2015): 69-93; “The 19th-century piano and finger-strengthening devices,” The Musical Times 162/1956 (2021): 21-39; “Quantz and Agricola: A Literary Collaboration,” Acta Musicologica 88 (2016/2): 127-42; “Notes inégales: a definitive new parameter,” Early Music 42/2 (2014): 273-89; “Intonation Standards and Equal Temperament: 1600-1900,” Tijdschrift voor Muziek /Dutch Journal of Music Theory (2007): 215-227. Research for the present article led to uncovering a most extraordinary event in the history of music publishing.
Mara Lane
Mara Lane is a graduate student in music history at the University of California, Berkeley, where she focuses on opera staging and theories of acting. Her interests lie in how artistic process can be revealed to and noticed by audiences. This past fall she co-convened the conference Contemporary Opera on Stage: Institutions and Visions, which explored the creative possibilities of the proscenium stage and featured opera historians alongside members of the SF Opera creative team and John Adams. In addition to her graduate studies, she sings with small opera companies around the Bay Area.
Hedy Law
Hedy Law is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Music Theory and History at the University of Chicago. She has published in Cambridge Opera Journal, the Opera Quarterly, Musique et Geste en France: De Lully à la Révolution, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Censorship, the Oxford Handbook on Music and the Body, and the collection of essays Noises, Audition, Aurality: History of the Sonic Worlds in Europe, 1500–1918. Her book, Music, Pantomime, and Enlightenment France, was published by Boydell in 2020.
Nathan John Martin
Nathan John Martin is associate professor of music theory at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 2015. A specialist on Rameau’s theoretical writings and their early French reception, he has published widely on these matters in journals such as Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Theoria and elsewhere. His article “Toward a Global History of Music Theory” appears in the most recent issue of the Journal of Music Theory.
Downing Thomas
Thomas is Professor of French in the Department of French & Italian at the University of Iowa. He served as Associate Provost and Dean of International Programs at the UI from 2008 through 2019, and previously served as chair of his Department. In 2005, Thomas was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French government. He is the author of Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995) and Aesthetic of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785 (Cambridge, 2002), and co-edited with Roberta Montemorra Marvin Operatic migrations: transforming works and crossing boundaries. (Ashgate, 2006).
Ellen Welch
Ellen Welch is Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Chair of the Romance Studies department at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is author of A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction (2011) and A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France(2017) and has recently published articles on Ancien Regime publics and figures of noise in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, and French Studies.
Ziqian Xiao
Ziqian Xiao est doctorante en littérature française du XVIIIe siècle à la Sorbonne Université. Le sujet de sa thèse est « L’idée de plaisir et de douleur dans les écrits de Diderot ».