Evan MacCarthy

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Evan MacCarthy

Evan A. MacCarthy is assistant professor of music history in the West Virginia University School of Music. He received an A.B. in Classics and music from the College of the Holy Cross, and earned a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of fifteenth-century music and music theory, late medieval chant, German music in the Baroque era, as well as late nineteenth-century American music. He is writing a book on the intersections of music, pedagogy, and the revival of classical literature across the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century, focusing on the different spheres of humanistic and scholastic learning at Italian courts, cathedrals, and universities. The book explores how and why the surviving sources of Italian music theory were written, studied, and circulated, offering new new insight into the contemporary readers of these important texts. He is also producing an edition and first-ever translation of Ugolino of Orvieto’s Declaratio musice discipline (written c. 1435) for Brepols Press. He has served on the music faculties of Harvard University (where he was the Harvard College Fellow in music from 2010 to 2012), College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University. In 2012-13, he was the Committee for the Rescue of Italian art (CRIA) Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. Recently he has been awarded grants from the West Virginia Humanities Council, the Big XII Faculty Fellowship Program, the Lila Wallace - Reader's Digest Lecture Program, and the WVU Faculty Senate Research Grant Program. He is active as a singer, recently serving as the bass section leader of the Holy Cross Schola Cantorum under the direction of James David Christie. He is presently the director of the WVU Collegium Musicum, a performing ensemble specializing in music before 1800.

Recent Publications

“Antoine Haneron au croisement des exchanges musicaux," in Le Hainault et la musique de la Renaissance, eds. Camilla Cavicchi, Marie-Alexis Colin, Sandrine Theiffry (Brepols Publishers: Epitome Musical, forthcoming).

“The English Voyage of Pietrobono Burzelli,” Journal of Musicology 35, no. 4 (2018, forthcoming).

"The Song of Iopas in Renaissance Italy," in Virgil and Renaissance Culture, eds. Luke Houghton and Marco Sgarbi (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in press 2018).

“What’s in a Name? The Origins of Pietrobono Burzelli,” Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke voor Nederlandse Musikgeschiedenis 65/1-2 (2016): 5–11.

Review of Paul Schleuse, Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi (Indiana University Press, 2015), in Renaissance Quarterly 69/2 (2016): 1553-1555.

Review of Tim Shephard, Echoing Helicon: Music, Art and Identity in the Este Studioli, 1440-1530 (Oxford University Press, 2014), in Journal of the American Musicological Society 69/1 (2016): 237–241.

“Transformations in Music Theory and Music Treatises,” in The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, eds. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 602–614.

“New Light on Recruiting Singers during the Papal Schism: A Letter from Pope Urban VI,” in Qui musicam in se habet: Studies in Honor of Alejandro Planchart, eds. Anna Zayaruznaya, Bonnie J. Blackburn, and Stanley Boorman (Münster: American Institute of Musicology, 2015) 225–229.

Review of Russell E. Murray, Jr., Susan Forscher Weiss, and Cynthia J. Cyrus, Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2010), in Journal of Musicological Research 34/1 (2015): 85–89.

“’This is another and greater subject’: Leonardo Bruni on music,” Renaissance Then and Now: Danza, Musica e Teatro per un nuovo Rinascimento, ed. Stefano Baldassarri (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2014), 101–109.

“The Sources and Early Readers of Ugolino of Orvieto’s Declaratio Musice Discipline,” in Beyond 50 Years of Ars Nova Studies at Certaldo, 1959-2009 (L’Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento, vol. VIII), ed. Marco Gozzi, Agostino Ziino, and Francesco Zimei (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2014), 401–425.

Review of Wendy Heller, Music in the Baroque (W. W. Norton, 2013), in Early Music America 20/1 (Spring 2014): 60.

“Tinctoris and the Neapolitan Eruditi,” Journal of the Alamire Foundation 5/1 (April 2013): 41–68.

“Teaching from the Organ Bench: Nineteenth-Century Origins of Harvard’s Music Curriculum,” in The Organ in the Academy, eds. Thomas F. Kelly and Lesley Bannatyne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Music, 2013), 23–36.

“Giacomo Paladini: A Professional Singer and Bishop in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, eds. Louis A. Waldman, Machtelt Israëls, et al. (2 vols.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), II, 609–614.

Review of Fabrice Fitch and Jacobijn Kiel, eds., Essays in Honor of David Fallows: Bon jour, bon mois, et bonne estrenne (Boydell Press, 2011), in Early Music America 18/2 (Summer 2012): 47–48.

Review of Timothy McGee, The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence (Indiana University Press, 2009), in Early Music America 16/1 (Spring 2010): 60.

Magnus Liber Organi, vol. vii (Les Organa Dupla and les Clausules à deux voix, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmstad), ed. Edward Roesner. Plainchants edited by Evan MacCarthy and Greta-Mary Hair (L’Oiseau-Lyre, Paris, 2009).

Contact Information

Evan.MacCarthy@mail.wvu.edu

(304) 293-4513

412A Creative Arts Center

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