Katherine Baber

Katherine Baber pursues questions of identity in American music, from the personal to the national. Her work focuses on the career of Leonard Bernstein and the ways in which his compositions, his conducting and educational activities, and his profile as a public figure have shaped the definition of American music, here and abroad. In 2013 she was awarded a Fulbright grant to study Bernstein’s reception in Vienna and to lead seminars on American musical culture at the University of Vienna and the University for Music and the Performing Arts. She has two forthcoming publications based on her research at the archives of the Salzburg Festival, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and the Vienna Philharmonic: a comparative essay on Bernstein’s role in Mahler’s reception in Austria and the United States, and a chapter on his relationship with Vienna’s public and its musical institutions in Leonard Bernstein und seine Zeit (ed. Andreas Eichhorn). Her forthcoming book, Leonard Bernstein’s Jazz, considers Bernstein’s particular understanding of jazz—as a cluster of styles, performers, and cultural associations–and its role in the articulation his own Jewish-American identity, his formulation of American music, and his engagement with American political life during the era of the Cold War and Civil Rights. Professor Baber seeks to intertwine teaching, mentoring, and research; she recently received a Graves Award in the Humanities to fund the writing of a book chapter on the American symphony at mid-century in conjunction with the offering an undergraduate seminar on transformations of the symphonic genre in the United States and the rise of distinctly American listening culture.

• B.M., Indiana University

• Ph.D. in Musicology, Indiana University

• American Music  
• Twentieth-Century Music  
• Music Theater  
• Jazz Historiography  
• Jewish Identity and Music  
• Topic Theory and Musical Meaning

• Graves Award in the Humanities (2014-2015)

• Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor of Austria-America Studies in Austria (2013)

• Walter Kaufmann Prize, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University (2010)