Lydia Goehr is Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. In 2009/2010 she received a Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, in 2007/8 The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)’s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA), and in 2005, a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at U. California, Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. In 2012, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for an article on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. In 2002-3, she was the visiting Aby Warburg Professor in Hamburg and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2005-6, she delivered the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology in London and the Wort Lectures at Cambridge University. In 2008, she was a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin (Cluster: “The Language of Emotions”) and in 2009, a visiting professor in the FU-Berlin SFB Theater und Fest. In 2019, she was Visiting Professor at the University of Torino, and in 2020, a Mellon fellow at the Tate Museum in London. In 2022-23, she was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute (Empirical Aesthetics) in Frankfurt and taught at the Courtauld Institute, London. For more information, please click here.

A public scholar, educator, and musicologist, Dr. Kristi Brown-Montesano finds joy in teaching people about music and culture. From 2003–22, she served as Chair of Music History at the Colburn Conservatory, helping to shape the degree programs of that institution. Brown-Montesano is currently in her fourth year as a Lecturer in Musicology at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music, where she has the privilege of working with a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate students. Dr. Brown-Montesano is also an active scholar-educator with many of Southern California’s acclaimed musical organizations, including the Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, La Jolla Music Society, and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. A respected opera scholar, Brown Montesano collaborates regularly with the Los Angeles Opera on a variety of educational initiatives, from pre-performance talks and podcasts to “Opera for Educators” seminar lectures. Her book, Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas—originally published by the University of California Press in 2007—was reissued in paperback in 2021, responding to a growing new readership interested in fresh, feminist critique of opera culture and reception. Dr. Brown-Montesano’s other research areas include opera and children, classical music in contemporary media, the popular reception of J.S. Bach in postwar America, and various manifestations of Sherlock Holmes as musician, including the mystery of his preference for old violins. For more information, please visit kristibrownmontesano.com.

Cellist Michael Kannen has distinguished himself as a musician and educator of uncommon accomplishment who is comfortable in widely diverse musical situations and venues.  He was a founding member of the Brentano String Quartet, with whom he performed throughout the world and on radio, television and recordings.  He has appeared at chamber music festivals across the country and with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has also been a member of the Meliora Quartet and the Figaro Trio.  He is currently a member of the Apollo Trio and is the Director of Chamber Music at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where he holds the Sidney Friedberg Chair in Chamber Music. For more information, please visit michaelkannen.com