Profile
Catherine Coppola is a musicologist and permanent Lecturer in the Music Department and incoming Chair of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program at Hunter College of CUNY, where she teaches core major courses and those of her own design such as Reframing Opera: Gender, Race, Class; Musical Quotation and Allusion; and Women and Power in Mozart’s Operas. On the latter, her ASECS presentation, “Fallacies of Context and Change,” was described as “a brilliant critique of contemporary engagement with Mozart’s women” in the conference review for Eighteenth-Century Music (March 2020).
In her research and teaching she focuses on a nuanced approach to thorny issues of complicity, race, and gender in canonic operas to show how a fuller view of the context, then and now, can help us to confront more directly and productively the troubling issues raised in their stories. She is currently working on two book projects about dramatic music and its relevance—one focusing on performance and scholarship, with emphasis on recent interactions among scholars and practitioners that point to exciting paths forward, and the other on pedagogy connected to these themes.
Growing from this work is her forthcoming invited chapter, “The Dialogue as Indispensable,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, edited by Jessica Waldoff. She has also been invited to join the Board of the Mozart Society of America and the pre-concert lecturers for Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series.