Department of Music Lecture: Julie Cumming, Associate Professor of Music History in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University

Lecture Title: “Revisiting the Origins of the Italian Madrigal”

Julie Cumming is Associate Professor of Music History in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. She is the author of The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (Cambridge University Press, 1999), in which she explores the transformation of the motet from 1400-1474. Cumming has published articles and reviews in Speculum (the journal of the Medieval Academy of America), the Journal of Musicology, New Grove Opera, and Early Music, as well as in numerous edited collections, including the Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Her current work looks at fifteenth- and sixteenth-century compositional process, with emphasis on the connections between historical improvisation and composition. Other areas of research include analysis of Renaissance music, book history and music printing in the Renaissance, baroque opera, and digital humanities in music. Cumming was awarded the Schulich School of Music Full-Time Teaching Award (2007), McGill’s David Thomson Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Supervision (2015), and, most recently, the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools Teaching Award, doctoral level (2017).