Music Lecture: Elaine Sisman (Columbia University)

"Tripping the Late Fantastic: Haydn's Avian Mechanisms and Their Progeny." Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, the Cambridge Handbook Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she has published numerous essays on music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that interweave history, biography, aesthetics, and analysis. She is currently working on studies of Don Giovanni, mechanical music, and the music of illumination. She received the PhD in music history from Princeton University and has taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. Sisman was awarded the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society in 1983 for best article by a younger scholar, serves on the boards of Haydn and Mozart societies as well as The Musical Quarterly and The Journal of Musicology, and completed a term as president of the American Musicological Society, which elected her to Honorary Membership in 2011. In 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.