Gaining Clarity About the World Through the Study of Music
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Growing up in rural Colorado, Marianna Ritchey played piano throughout her childhood, but she didn’t truly fall in love with music until her first year at Lewis & Clark College. There, at her advisor’s recommendation, she took an introductory course on the history of Western music to fill a gap in her schedule. Though she describes it as a standard “stylistic chronological march through music history,” Ritchey says the course’s amazing instructor, Aaron Beck, turned her on to the magic of music. “It felt like this was my entry into the whole world—into thinking about difference and culture and history in a much bigger sense than I ever had before,” she recalls. Beck went on to become Ritchey’s long-term mentor and inspire her to become a musicologist.
That course introduced Ritchey to so many radically different sounds—from Gregorian chant to Meredith Monk to John Cage—all jumbled together under the rubric of “Western music.”
“Some of this was so outside my sphere of even knowing how to understand it as music. This panoply of difference really impressed itself on me. I became interested in music as a philosophical, ontological topic. I was fascinated by how all these different people across time and space have understood what music is and the reason for making it,” she says.
Simultaneously, Ritchey became deeply involved in the vibrant indie rock and punk music scene in Portland, Oregon, playing in bands, touring, and recording music. This experience, combined with her formal musicology training, has had an ongoing influence on her research. After several years as a performing musician, she earned a PhD in musicology from UCLA, where she wrote her dissertation on the French Romantic composer and conductor Hector Berlioz. She worked as a visiting professor at Lewis & Clark for three years before joining the UMass Amherst faculty in 2014.
Today an associate professor in UMass’s Department of Music and Dance, Ritchey is a scholar of classical music in the context of modern American capitalism. Her work, which examines music and musicology through diverse lenses, is pushing the field in new directions.
“It is hard to underestimate how transformative and impactful Professor Ritchey’s research has been for the discipline of musicology and more generally for contemporary discourse around music,” says Ritchey’s colleague, Emiliano Ricciardi, associate professor of music history. “Professor Ritchey is a rare example of a musicologist who not only engages with music and issues of our time but does so in a compelling and thought-provoking manner, making her work relevant to current artistic and intellectual discourse.”
The field of classical music is traditionally rooted in the past, but Ritchey asks what it means to be a classical musician in 21st-century America. Moreover, musicology has typically focused on the development and realization of artistic ideas by composers and musicians, but Ritchey is interested in contextualizing this “idea work” in the economic system in which artists live and work today.
Her 2019 book, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (University of Chicago Press), examines how successful contemporary composers and musicians “understand, explain, and brand themselves as people trying to straddle this contradictory line between classical music as this historical tradition and all the necessities of making a living as an artist today,” Ritchey explains. The book also explores how classical music, from Beethoven to the present, is co-opted for corporate branding and promoting American capitalism.
Ritchey’s second book, Practice for the End of the World: Music, Academia, and Political Change, due out in spring 2027 from Wesleyan University Press, builds on her first book to explore contradictions and political problems in classical music practice as well as in universities and academia, including musicology itself. Other recent research, to be published in forthcoming articles, explores music from a variety of interdisciplinary lenses, including anthropology, animal studies, and Marxist theory.
"I want students to figure out how to ask questions about difficult art as a way of learning about people with different perspectives and expanding their understanding of the world."
Marianna Ritchey
At UMass, Ritchey teaches music history courses for majors as well as an interdisciplinary General Education class on art appreciation. She has taught the latter course nearly every semester since 2014, and has redesigned it to be more creative and experimental. Ritchey intends it to be challenging to her students, “shocking them” out of their unexamined assumptions about art by asking questions like “What does it mean if art isn’t beautiful? Or if it’s disturbing? What if you don’t know how to make sense of it?”
“The main theme of the course is engaging with radically different, unfamiliar, alienating approaches to art as a way of developing a comfort with—rather than a fear of—those aspects,” she says. “I want students to figure out how to ask questions of difficult art as a way of learning about people with different perspectives and expanding their understanding of the world.”
She adds, “The corollary to that is I want my students to come away feeling empowered to make art themselves. Experimental art is potentially very democratizing.”
Ultimately, says Ritchey, musicology has helped her to find clarity about herself and her relationship with the world in which she lives, and she hopes to share this with others through her scholarship.
“Over the years, I’ve had really cool conversations with young musicians and composers who have read my book and emailed me saying that my work helped something click for them—it helped them think more clearly about themselves and the world,” she says. “That’s really my goal. I think that’s the political work that I see my scholarly work doing in the world.”