UCLA Center for the Study of Women

My background as a performer shapes how I write about music. I came to musicology after receiving my undergraduate and master’s degrees in piano performance at The Juilliard School. When I started graduate school in the Department of Musicology at UCLA, I gravitated toward studying issues related to performance, topics such as virtuosity and performance practice. Meanwhile, I noticed that the campus abounded with scholars whose interest in performance had inspired them to experiment in their writing, figures such as Sue-Ellen Case, Elisabeth Le Guin, Susan Leigh Foster, and Susan McClary. Common to their work is the absence of a boundary between their identities as performers and their identities as scholars; their understanding of the performing body spurs them to perform in their writing. Perhaps Susan Leigh Foster says it best: “I am a body writing. I am a bodily writing.”