Martha Feldman (musicologist)

Feldman's recent work considers how voices are entangled with race, bodies, and memory, including essays on fugitive voice and the collection The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality, coedited with Judith T. Zeitlin (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

A number of Feldman’s projects involve scholarly exchange. The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, coedited with Bonnie Gordon (Oxford University Press, 2006, winner of the Ruth A. Solie Award of the American Musicological Society), included essays on early modern courtesans’ music by Feldman’s graduate students. Feldman’s faculty seminar “The Voice Project,” an interdisciplinary faculty initiative sponsored by UChicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society for which she was co-principal investigator with David Levin and Judith Zeitlin, led to The Voice as Something More. And the colloquy “Why Voice Now?” (Journal of the American Musicological Society 2015), emerged from a joint session of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory. The project “Errant Voices: Performances beyond Measure,” co-organized with Bonnie Gordon and Kara Keeling, explores insurgent and resilient voices comparatively across trans, raced, and castrato cases.

Feldman’s scholarship has centered on vernacular vocal genres and performances, often Italian, from the sixteenth through the present. Her first monograph, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995) is, in the words of Laura Buch, "an interdisciplinary study whose dense multilayering constructs a labyrinthine hall of mirrors that chronicles patterns of Venetian literary, musical, and political thought at mid-sixteenth century." Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007), her second book, "fills a notable void" by capturing opera seria's "cultural-historical breadth" and explaining its "remarkable popularity and versatility" while also exploring the new territory of "the multifarious technologies through whish opera seria engaged with the ideological horizon of absolutism." In fall 2007 she gave the Ernest Bloch Lectures at the University of California at Berkeley; these talks culminated in The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (University of California Press, 2015), which went on to win the American Musicological Society's Kindeldey Award. Of this contribution to the castrato literature, Uta Protz writes,

Martha Feldman (born 1954) is an American musicologist and cultural historian. Since 1990 she has taught at the University of Chicago where she is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College. Feldman also holds appointments to the faculty of Theater and Performance Studies and serves as affiliated faculty in Romance Languages and Literatures and at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Born in Philadelphia to a family of artists, she studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in Music History and Theory in 1987. She is married to composer and jazz musician Patricia Barber.