Music Lecture: Julie Cumming (McGill University)

"Choirbooks and Partbooks: Different Formats, Different Affordances." Julie E. Cumming received her B.A. in Music and Medieval Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and her M.A. (1982) and Ph.D in Music and Medieval Studies at UC-Berkeley. She was the review editor for Historical Performance, the journal of Early Music America (1988-92), and review editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2004-2008). Professor Cumming's major area of expertise is late Medieval and Renaissance polyphony, with a monograph on fifteenth-century music, "The Motet in the Age of Du Fay" (Cambridge University Press, 1999). She 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. Her current work focuses on fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century compositional process, with emphasis on the connections between improvisation and composition. Other areas of interest include analysis of Renaissance music, music printing in the Renaissance, baroque opera and digital humanities.