Jean Christensen
Music History, Division Head
Professor
of Music History, Dr. Jean Christensen received her Ph.D. from the
University of California at Los Angeles with a dissertation on Arnold
Schoenberg's Oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. She has also spent extensive
periods studying in Paris and in Copenhagen. On the faculty of the
Music History Department at the University of Louisville since 1979,
Dr. Christensen whose specialty is twentieth-century music, has
published on topics relating to Arnold Schoenberg, contemporary Danish
music, and the history of jazz in metropolitan Louisville. Chair of the
Department since 1987 and Director of Graduate Studies at the School of
Music since 1994, she also coordinates the University of Louisville and
University of Kentucky cooperative program for the Ph.D. in musicology.
Dr. Christensen is currently working on a bibliographical study of the
reception of Arnold Schoenberg's music and thought from 1896 to the
present. This publication will complement her From Arnold Schoenberg's Literary Legacy: A Catalog of Neglected Items from 1988. In
1993 Christensen established a center for a collection of Danish
musical resources in the Anderson Memorial Music Library. Her most
recent publication which draws on this collection and on her study in
Denmark is an extended essay on the music in Denmark since 1950. It
will be published as Part I in The New Music in Nordic Countries by Pendragon Press (2002). An earlier publication, The Voice of Music
(Ashgate Publications, (2000), is a collection of her translations
(from Danish) of 22 interviews with composers and includes composers
from Scandinavia (Nørgård, Nordheim, Lindberg, among others), Russia
(Gubaidulina, Schnittke, Denisov, Krennikov), Europe (Ligeti,
Stockhausen, Szymanski, Xenakis) and America (Glass).
Research for work at the Danish Music Information Center in Copenhagen
was supported by a fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation
in New York. Other support for Dr. Christensen's research has come from
the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, Marshall Foundation, Kentucky
Women's Foundation, the American Philospherical Society, the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Louisville Office of
Research. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark and Sweden in 1988 and
has recently been notified that she has received a Fulbright Research
Award (2002 and 2003) to carry out her newest project: a study of
contemporary music in Bulgaria.
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