Susan McClary Professor--Performance Practice, Music History, Music Theory Telephone:  (310) 825-4761 E-mail:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Office: 2842

SUSAN MCCLARY (Professor of Music and Associate Vice-Provost of the International Institute, UCLA; Ph.D. Harvard, 1976) teaches music analysis, history, and early-music performance. Her research focuses on the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres. In contrast with an aesthetic tradition that treats music as ineffable and transcendent, her work engages with the signifying dimensions of musical procedures and deals with this elusive medium as a set of social practices. She is best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), which examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body in various musical repertories, ranging from early seventeenth-century opera to the songs of Madonna. 

 

McClary is also author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000), Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge University Press, 1992; Italian edition. 2007), and coeditor with Richard Leppert of Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (1987). In her more recent publications, she explores the many ways in which subjectivities have been construed in music from the sixteenth-century onward. Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal(2004) won the Otto Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society in 2005, andshe is now finishing Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music. A collection of her most influential essays was commissioned from Ashgate with the title Reading Music: Selected Essays by Susan McClary.   

 

Before arriving to teach at UCLA in 1994, McClary taught at the University of Minnesota (1977-91) and McGill University (1991-94). She won university-wide teaching awards at University of Minnesota (1987) and UCLA (1997). Since 1993 she has delivered the Bloch Lectures at Berkeley, the Grout Lecture at Cornell, the Hooker Lectures at McMaster, the Huang Lecture in Hong Kong, the Alfred Hook Lecture at University of Sydney, the Centre CATH Lectures in Leeds, the Faculty Research Lecture at UCLA, and the Curry Lecture at the University of Michigan; she holds a professorship at the University of Oslo and — in 2009 — a chair in music theory in the Netherlands. In 2010  she will direct a seminar at the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory. Her work has been translated into at least twelve languages.

 

McClary has chaired the Board of Directors for the American Council of Learned Societies and served on the editorial boards ofSigns, Perspectives of New Music, Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, ECHO, Musica Humana, and Music and the Moving Image. While living in Minneapolis, she wrote and produced a music-theater piece, Susanna Does the Elders (1987). McClary received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995.