Martha Feldman

Martha Feldman (born October 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. 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.

Scholarship Feldman's scholarship has centered on vernacular vocal genres and performances, often Italian, from the sixteenth century 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 which 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, "What Feldman's meticulously researched, beautifully written and richly illustrated work achieves is to finally shed light on the contradictory rise, voices and eventual demise of the castrati, and, moreover, to convincingly show that these castrated males were produced not as non-men but as idealized men. To this end, the author draws on social history and gender studies as well as on musicology, literary critique and psychology." 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. 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.

Highlights of special honors

2001: Dent Medal, awarded by the Royal Musical Association in collaboration with the Directorium of the International Musicological Society 2009: Faculty Award (University of Chicago) for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring 2012: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2017-18: President, American Musicological Society 2020: Honorary Membership, American Musicological Society

Major publications and projects Monographs The Castrato Phantom: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome (book-in-progress) The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. Ernest Bloch Lectures, no. 16. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. (Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society) City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. (Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference and the Center for Reformation Research) “Music and Sound at the Edges of History.” Co-edited with Nicholas Mathew. Special issue of Representations 154, no. 1 (Spring 2021). Select journal articles “Music Histories from the Edge,” co-authored with Nicholas Mathew, Representations, special issue on “Music and Sound at the Edges of History,” vol. 154, issue 1 (Spring 2021): 1–9, coedited with Nicholas Mathew. “Voice Gap Crack Break,” in The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality, coedited by Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 188–208. “Castrato Acts,” The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 395–418. “Denaturing the Castrato,” Opera Quarterly 24/3-4 (fall 2008): 178–199. “The Courtesan’s Voice: Petrarchan Lovers, Pop Philosophy, and Oral Traditions,” in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-cultural Perspectives, co-ed. with Bonnie Gordon (Oxford University Press, 2006), 103–23, 354–56. "Magic Mirrors and the Seria Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View," Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1995): 423–84.