Evan A. MacCarthy

Evan A. MacCarthy is Five College Visiting Associate Professor of music history in the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received a B.A. 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 nineteenth-century American music.

Articles, book chapters, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, the Journal of the Alamire Foundation, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, Renaissance Quarterly, Early Music America, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke voor Nederlandse Musikgeschiedenis, Journal of Musicological Research, The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Music in the Renaissance, and other edited collections on Renaissance music and culture.

His forthcoming book Ruled by the Muses: Italian Humanists and their Study of Music in the Fifteenth Century explores the musical lives of scholars who sought to revive the cultural and intellectual traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. He is also producing an edition and first-ever translation for the Epitome Musical series at Brepols Press of Ugolino of Orvieto’s encyclopedic treatise on the nature and notation of music (Declaratio musicae disciplinae, written c. 1435). He edited the plainchants for the seventh and final volume of the Magnus Liber Organi edition (ed. Edward Roesner; Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre), and he recently completed a series of liner notes for the first-ever recordings of orchestral works by Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956), recently recorded by the Lviv National Philharmonic of Ukraine, INSO-Lviv Symphony Orchestra (with soloist Joshua Bell), and MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra (with soloist Matt Haimovitz). Many of his publications are available on his academia [dot] edu page.

He is also Director of ELEMENTS, a multi-year arts and humanities research project at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, which explores the four classical elements of earth, air, fire and water through a variety of cultural lenses across disciplines and across time. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, the project traces the roles played by these material elements and their constant state of flux in shaping conceptions of the cosmos, framing notions of origin, myth, religion, balance, and natural philosophy, and capturing the poetic powers of the natural world. Lectures, roundtables, workshops, listening sessions, exhibits, and performances in the calendar year 2024 were dedicated to the element of water, and 2025 will be centered on the element of earth.

Over the years, MacCarthy has mentored and advised for a wide range of graduate and undergraduate thesis and dissertation topics: musically-induced mania and the ancient Greek aulos; recent cultures of competition for the Pulitzer Prize for Music; Cold War politics and music for Olympic figure skating programs; musical representations of mental illness in contemporary Broadway musicals; the search for identity in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler; memory and improvisation in performances of the Old English epic Beowulf; collaborative social justice through choral musicking; historically informed performance practices for Brahms's violin sonatas; the concept of lateness in the late songs of Johannes Brahms and of Hugo Wolf; Isang Yun's works for solo flute; the careers of female- and queer-identifying electroacoustic music composers; analyzing the music of Pink Floyd; writing, recording, and producing an EP album based on the poetry of T.S. Eliot; motivic analysis in the film music of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; the saxophone and music at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse; and independent study topics on music before 1000; nostalgia, memory, and imagination in the arts; music and neuroscience; the music of cult worship of Apollo and of Dionysos in ancient Greece. His courses offered at UMass Amherst include Music Appreciation (MUS 100), Literature of Music (MUS 101), History of Western Music: 1700-1900 (MUS 301), Writing about Music (MUS 350, Junior-Year Writing course), Music in the Global Middle Ages (MUS 640), Music in Tudor England (MUS 646), Shakespeare and Music (MUS 690K), J.S. Bach: Then & Now (MUS 647), Sounding American in the Nineteenth Century (MUS 690C), The Concept of Late Style in Music (MUS 690S), Art Song (MUS 690N).

Before coming to UMass Amherst, he served on the faculty of West Virginia University’s School of Music, where he was promoted to Associate Professor, and previously the faculties of Harvard University, College of the Holy Cross, MIT, and Boston University. Awards, grants, and fellowships include the NEH Rome Prize in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the American Academy in Rome, the Committee for the Rescue of Italian Art (CRIA) Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the West Virginia Humanities Council, the Big XII Faculty Fellowship Program, and the Lila Wallace - Reader's Digest Lecture Program. He has served two terms as President of the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society, as the Discipline Representative for Music for the Renaissance Society of America, and has served on the AMS Council, the Folger Institute Consortium and Executive Committee, the Advisory Board of the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, the Steering Committee of the New England Medieval Consortium, and the Steering Committee of the Five College Early Music Program. He is presently co-convenor with Sanam Nader-Esfahani (Amherst College) of the Five College Renaissance Seminar and one of the co-organizers of the biennial UMass Bach Festival & Symposium.