Marianna Ritchey
Associate Professor, Music History; Area Coordinator

Marianna Ritchey is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She spent much of her young adulthood in Portland, Oregon, playing and touring in various indie rock bands, before going to UCLA for a PhD in Musicology. She has written about Berlioz, comedy, the dies irae, the films of Guy Maddin, music history pedagogy, and operatic representations of Steve Jobs.
Ritchey’s book, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (U. Chicago Press, 2019), explores the penetration of classical music practices and discourses by capitalist ideologies in the contemporary United States. She is currently working on an array of topics having to do with music and political imagining. In addition to research and teaching, she is involved in mutual aid work and other abolition projects in her community. She also enjoys sourdough baking, board games, Breath of the Wild, drone music, improv comedy, and teasing her dog.