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Julie E. Cumming

Academic title(s): 

Professor (Sabbatical leave, Fall '24/Winter '25)

Julie E. Cumming
Department: 
Music Research
Area(s): 
Music History/Musicology
Contact Information
Address: 

Wirth Music Building A 628

Phone: 
514-398-4400 Ext 00313
Email address: 
julie.cumming [at] mcgill.ca
Group: 
Faculty
Office: 
Wirth Music Building A 628
Salutation: 
Prof
Degree(s): 

BA, Music and听Medieval Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University, 1980

MA, Musicology, University of California, Berkeley, 1982

PhD, 听Musicology and Medieval Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1987

Areas of expertise: 

Renaissance music; musicology; the motet; the madrigal; improvisation and compositional process; digital humanities; history of the book; music notation 1100 to 1600. 听

Current research: 

Re-examining the origins of the madrigal, using empirical and cultural evidence.

Mapping the Musical Landscape of the 16th Century: How does music move across time, space, and cultures.

Biography: 

Julie E. Cumming received her B.A. in Music and Medieval Studies at听,听听(1980), and her M.A. (1982) and Ph.D (1987) in Music and Medieval Studies at the听. She taught for seven years at听听before moving to听91社区听in 1992. In addition to musicology she has played the recorder professionally, helped run the summer workshop, Amherst Early Music, and conducted the Collegium at听. She was the review editor for Historical Performance, the journal of Early Music America (1988-92), and review editor for the听Journal of the American Musicological Society (2004-2008).听听

Professor Cumming was听the Interim Dean of the Schulich School of Music in听2016-2017. She has served the Schulich School of Music as Director of Graduate Studies (2001-2003 and 2009-2010), and as Associate Dean of Research and Administration (2011-2016). In this role she shepherded multiple successful CFI grant applications for CIRMMT and members of the Schulich School of Music.听 She created and chaired the Technical Management Committee and the Digital Rights Management Committee.听

Professor Cumming's major area of expertise is late Medieval and Renaissance polyphony.听 She is the author of听The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (Cambridge University Press, 1999), in which she explores the transformation of the motet from 1400-1474. She has published articles and reviews in听Speculum (the journal of the Medieval Academy of America), the听Journal of Musicology, New Grove Opera, and Early Music, as well as in numerous edited collections, including the Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Her current work looks at fifteenth- and sixteenth-century compositional process, with emphasis on the connections between historical improvisation and composition; she often collaborates with her colleague in Music Theory, Peter Schubert. Other areas include analysis of Renaissance music, book history and music printing in the Renaissance, baroque opera, and digital humanities in music.听She was the principal investigator of an international Digging into Data Challenge Grant, 鈥淓lectronic Locator of Vertical Interval Successions (ELVIS): The first large data-driven research project on musical style鈥 (2012-2014; ).听 She was a co-investigator on the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative 鈥淢aking Publics鈥 (Paul Yachnin, PI, 2005-2010; ), and a co-investigator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant 鈥淓arly Modern Conversions鈥 (Paul Yachnin, PI, 2013-2018; ). She was the co-leader (with Ichiro Fujinaga, PI) of a SSHRC Partnership Grant, 鈥淪IMSSA: Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis鈥 (2014-2023; ). She is a co-investigator on a second SSHRC Partnership Grant, "LinkedMusic," Ichiro Fujinaga, PI. This project is about searching metadata for music informationon on all kinds of online databases from all over the world from a single online interface. Cumming's focus is on linking data about musical sources with symbolic music scores of pieces from those sources, making it possible to link musical characteristics with information on date, genre, and composer.听

Professor Cumming was awarded the Schulich School of Music Full-Time Teaching Award (2007),听91社区鈥檚 David Thomson Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Supervision (2015), and the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools Teaching Award, doctoral level听(2017). She has supervised PhD dissertations on wind players in Spain c. 1600, early eighteenth-century English theatre music, espionage in Elizabethan England, parody masses, accidentals in fifteenth-century music, sine nomine masses in the fifteenth century, music and the plague in the Renaissance, Attaingnant鈥檚 motet prints, Venetian language polyphony, music about music in the Renaissance, the Early Music听revival, 听Renaissance counterpoint treatises, early notation, and expression in music c. 1500. She has supervised MA theses on Hildegard von Bingen, fifteenth-century chansons, Heinrich Biber, Handel's borrowing, madrigal and lute song, Salve regina settings by Galuppi, repetition in the music of Comp猫re, motets on texts from the Song of Songs, Marian motets and confraternities in the early sixteenth century, Ariosto settings from sixteenth-century Verona, improvised polyphony in Colonial Mexico, and the Masses of Ippolito Baccusi.听Her former students and postdocs teach at University of Toronto, University of Aberdeen, University of Victoria, Loyola College (Baltimore), University of Utah, and Brandeis University.听

Interviews: 

Teaching for Learning @ 91社区 | (February 7, 2023)

Awards, honours, and fellowships: 

Professor Cumming was awarded the Schulich School of Music Full-Time Teaching Award (2007), 91社区鈥檚 David Thomson Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Supervision (2015), and the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools Teaching Award, doctoral level (2017).

Courses: 

Western Musical Traditions: a music history course, 12th to 21st century, where two-thirds of the pieces are by women.听

Music Paleography: the history of music notatin from the 12th through the 16th century.

Undergraduate Music History courses: Baroque Opera,听Medieval Music,听Renaissance Music

Graduate seminars on the motet, the madrigal, historical improvisation, music printing.听

Selected publications: 

Julie E. Cumming. The Motet in the Age of Du Fay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, October 1999.

Julie Cumming and Cory McKay. 鈥淯sing Corpus Studies to Find the Origins of the Madrigal.鈥 Proceedings of the Conference Future Directions of Music Cognition, March 2021. ; paper and video with musical examples: . DOI 10.17605/osf.io/mqezt.

Finn Upham and Julie Cumming. 鈥淎uditory Streaming Complexity and Renaissance Mass Ordinary Cycles.鈥 Empirical Musicology Review 15 (2021), no. 3-4: 202-222. ; .

Julie Cumming and Evelyn Tribble. 鈥淒istributed Cognition, Improvisation and the Performing Arts in Early Modern Europe.鈥 Chapter 12 of A History of Distributed Cognition 2: From Medieval to Renaissance Culture, edited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler, 205-228. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 2019.

Julie E. Cumming. 鈥淪ources and Identity: Composers and Singers in Darnton鈥檚 Communications Circuit.鈥 Introductory article in Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources Before 1600, ed. Tim Shepherd and Lisa Colton, 25-38. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017.

Julie Cumming and Peter Schubert. 鈥淭he Origins of Pervasive Imitation.鈥 Chapter 12 in The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin, 200-228. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Curriculum vitae: 
Teaching areas: 

Music history survey,听Medieval music, Renaissance music, Baroque opera,听Music paleography,听Singing from Renaissance notation, Historical improvisation

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