Education

  • B.Mus., McGill University, 1984
  • M.A. in Neuere Deutsche Philologie, Romanische Literaturen, and Musikwissenschaft, Technische Universität Berlin, 1987
  • Ph.D. in Musicology, Eastman School of Music, 1994

Research

Tamara Levitz’s research focuses on the relationship between word and music in global musical and literary modernism. Her historical work in this area culminated in 2013, when she won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for her monograph Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone, in which she explored modernism through the prism of the collaboration between Igor Stravinsky and André Gide. Since that time, she has investigated systemic racism and exclusion in the music disciplines and comparative literature in the United States, moving more firmly into critical university studies. She is currently working on articles on the settler colonial foundation of Zora Neale Hurston’s music education (through a close reading of names in Dust Tracks), and on Black exclusion in the American Society of Aesthetics. She is also completing a monograph on Critique in the Shadow of Academic Freedom, in which she examines the racial capitalist foundation of academic freedom—a concept that has come to delimit the possibility of critique in the discipline of Music Theory.  In her teaching and criticism, she is dedicated to exploring the poetics of Hip Hop within a comparative context..

Languages

German, French, Spanish (reading), Italian (reading)

Field of Interest

Musical and Literary Modernism, Music-Text relationships, Aesthetics, Critical University Studies, Settler Colonialism, Hip Hop, Critical Theory, Academic Freedom, Disciplinary History.

Selection of Recent Publications

“Listening as Symbolic Revolt,” Texte zur Kunst 34, no. 135 (September 2024): 154-59, online at https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/135/tamara-levitz-beyonce-listening-symbolic-revolt/  [Review of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter]

“Hungry Listening in the Archive: The Correspondence between Ernest Naquayouma and Helen Heffron Roberts,” Resonance 5, no. 3 (2024): 254-72, online at https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2024.5.3.254

“Why I Don’t Teach Global Music History,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Special Issue “Teaching Global Music History: Practices and Challenges” (November 9, 2023): 118-137, online at https://ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/article/view/411

Contribution to “Five Scholars discuss Kendrick Lamar’s “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers,” Aesthetics for Birds, September 22, 2022, online at: https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2022/09/22/five-scholars-on-mr-morale/

“The Twentieth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Philosophy, eds. Jerrod Levinson, Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Ariana Philips-Hutton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 372-435, online at: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199367313.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199367313-e-12

“The Vernacular Avant-garde: A Speculation” by Tamara Levitz and Benjamin Piekut, ASAP Journal [Association for the Study of Arts of the Present], September 3, 2020, online at https://asapjournal.com/the-vernacular-avant-garde-a-speculation-tamara-levitz-and-benjamin-piekut/

“The Musicological Elite,” Current Musicology 102 (Spring 2018), 9-80, online at https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/currentmusicology/article/view/5363

“Decolonizing the Society for American Music,” The Bulletin of the Society for American Music XLIII, no. 3 (Fall 2017): online at https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.american-music.org/resource/resmgr/docs/bulletin/vol433.pdf