FACULTY BIOS

Joseph Horowitz

The New York Times has called Joe Horowitz “a force in classical music today, a prophet and an agitator.” Horowitz pursues a dual career as writer/scholar and producer. Of his eight books, four (including his young readers book Dvorak and America) relate to Dvořák’s American sojourn. Two – Classical Music in America: A History and Artists in Exile -- were named best books of the year by The Economist. His articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, 19^th Century Music, Musical Quarterly, American Music, The American Scholar, The Magazine of History, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. A former New York Times music critic, he has contributed more than 100 articles to the Times’ “Arts and Leisure” section. He is the author of “classical music” (among other articles) for both the Oxford Companion to American History and the Encyclopedia of New York State.  He frequently writes concert and book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (UK).

Horowitz also pursues a parallel career as a producer of thematic concert festivals. As Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic in the 1990s, he was a pioneering creator of humanities-infused public programming (“Dvorak and America,” “The Russian Stravinsky,” “American Transcendentalists,” etc.). As curator of the Pacific Symphony’s annual American Composers Festival, he has designed two-week festivals around Lou Harrison, William Bolcom, “Copland and Hollywood,” Chinese-American composers, etc. His three-week New Jersey Symphony “Winter Festivals” included “American Roots” and “Dvorak and America.” His current clients include the New York Philharmonic and the Pittsburgh Symphony. Horowitz’s own Post-Classical Ensemble, which he co-founded as Artistic Director in 2002, is a DC chamber orchestra specializing in the music of the Americas). The orchestra maintains an “educational partnership” with Georgetown University, forging linkage across the curriculum. He served as director of an NEH National Education Project on “Dvorak and America” and has mounted seven festivals exploring the topic of Dvorak’s American sojourn – for which he has received a commendation from the Czech Parliament. He has also received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEH fellowships, a Columbia University arts journalism fellowship, and two ASCAP/Deems Taylor awards. He annually serves as Artistic Director of the NEA’s Music Critics Institute at Columbia University. He has taught at the New England Conservatory, the Eastman School, and Colorado College, among other institutions. For radio, he has produced programming on Dvorak in America, Ives and Transcendentalism, and the history of the American orchestra. He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in America. His website is www.josephhorowitz.com.

Tim Barringer

Tim Barringer , Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, has published and lectured widely on British art and visual culture, art and empire, and on American art.  He was the winner of Yale University’s Sarai Ribicoff Prize for Teaching in 2004.  His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (Yale, 1998) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain’ (Yale, 2005), which won the Historians of British Art Book Prize.

He has curated several exhibitions, including 'American Sublime' (Tate Britain; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art & Minneapolis, 2002), the catalogue of which won the AXA/Art Newspaper Prize and the Henry Russell Hitchcock Award of the Victorian Society of the USA.

Michael Beckerman

Michael Beckerman is a Professor of Music at NYU. His research interests include Czech and Eastern European music, Janacek, Dvorak, Martinu, nationalism, Gypsies, Mozart, Brahms, Gilbert and Sullivan, Schubert, and film music. He received the Janacek Medal from the Czech Republic and is a Laureate of the Czech Music Council. He lectures widely and writes regularly for the New York Times.

Dale Cockrell

Dale Cockrell is Professor of Musicology in the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University.  He is the author of Demons of Disorder:  Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World and Excelsior:  Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1842-1846, among more than one hundred other books, articles, papers, and monographs.  His books have won various awards, he has been elected to high office by his colleagues, and he has been the happy recipient of several grants, including three NEH Fellowships.

Professor Cockrell’s place in the scheme of things is expressed by a view he often shares with his students:  the reason we study music, make music, enjoy music, write about music, and teach music is that the stuff appears to afford magical insight into the capacity that humankind possesses for living life in a yet fuller, richer, and more meaningful way. 

Steven Mayer

Credited with "piano playing at its most awesome" (The New York Times), pianist Steven Mayer has brought his unique repertoire of such jazz icons Art Tatum and Fats Waller, as well as music from Mozart to Liszt to Ives, to thousands of listeners worldwide.

Since his prize winning performance of Leon Kirchner’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Dennis Russell Davies and the American Composer’s Orchestra at The Third Carnegie Hall International American Music Competition, Mr. Mayer has brought his unique repertoire of classic jazz legends Art Tatum, Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton to festivals worldwide. In 2004-2005, Steven Mayer toured nationally with the scholar/writer Joseph Horowitz and the pianist Anthony de Mare as The American Piano, a flexibly constituted presentation including lectures, workshops, and master classes.

Jean Snyder

Jean Snyder, Professor of Music at Edinboro University, is an expert on Harry T. Burleigh. She is currently preparing a manuscript, Bringing in the Harlem Renaissance: The Life and Work of Harry T. Burleigh, for publication by the University of Illinois Press.

She has presented numerous papers at meetings of the Society for American Music, the Center for Black Music Research, and elsewhere. She also co-produced two compact disc recordings of music by African-American music: Deep River: Songs and Spirituals of Harry T. Burleigh, with bass-baritone Oral Moses and pianist Ann Sears, and Fi-yer! A Century of African-American Song, with tenor William A. Brown and pianist Ann Sears.

Mariana Whitmer

Mariana Whitmer obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Music from the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, and her Doctorate in Historical Musicology from the University of Chicago. In addition to her position as Executive Director of the Society for American Music (formerly the Sonneck Society), Whitmer is Project Coordinator at the Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary responsibility involves the Center’s education initiative, which is also a joint project of the Society, entitled Voices Across Time: American History Through Music, a teachers’ resource guide that is designed to assist secondary school teachers in promoting enthusiasm for American history while introducing their students to great American songs. Whitmer has co-directed three Summer Institutes for Teachers, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has presented Voices Across Time several times at conferences and workshops. Along with her other duties in the areas of outreach and development of the Stephen C. Foster Collection, Whitmer has published articles devoted to using songs to teach American history and has guest edited a special music issue of the Magazine of History, a publication of the Organization of American Historians. Whitmer also teaches an innovative new undergraduate course for the Music Department at the University of Pittsburgh, called “Music and Film.”

Robert Winter

Robert Winter, Professor of Music at UCLA, pursues work as a scholar, pianist and media author. He first became widely known to the general public for his nationally broadcast 10-week live-music series on Mozart and Beethoven for American Public Radio, on account of which Mark Swed, writing for The Wall Street Journal, described him as "probably the best public explicator of music since Leonard Bernstein."

As President of Calliope, a multimedia publishing company devoted to originally authored programs in the arts, humanities, and entertainment, Mr. Winter authored or produced numerous titles-from "Robert Winter's Crazy for Ragtime" (released in May 1996) to "Interactive Perlman" (a program exploring Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman) that have continued to receive wide critical acclaim. He was the recipient with Joseph Horowitz of an NEH grant for an interactive DVD entitled From the New World: A Composer's American. In a projected series of new titles combining research and broad appeal, Winter is setting his sights directly on an archaic 175-year old music training/teaching system that is ripe for fundamental rethinking.