Matilda Ann Butkas Ertz

Visiting Assistant Professor, Music History
502-852-0746
Email

Dr. Matilda Ertz is a Visiting Assistant Professor in music history at the University of Louisville School of Music where she also teaches piano and harpsichord at the U. of L. preparatory department. She has a PhD in Musicology from the University of Oregon with a supporting area in piano performance, as well as Master of Music Degrees in both Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She attended SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music for her undergraduate degree in Music Education with certificates in piano pedagogy and performance. Dr. Ertz studies music and dance, particularly ballet music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while maintaining interest in Baroque music, especially Johann Mattheson, rhetoric, and keyboard music. She is a pianist and harpsichordist with experience in a great variety of styles. She has also trained in dance, especially ballet. She has published research on George Balanchine, Schneitzhoeffer’s score to Filippo Taglioni’s La Sylphide, Nijinska’s and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, and Salvatore Viganò’s La Vestale. Recent paper presentations include “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Italy: Music and Story in the Ballet Bianchi e negri” (AMS, 2013) and “What Salvatore Viganò’s pastiche ballet scores can tell us about dance-mime drama and musical dramatic associations from Rossini to Haydn” (AMS South Central, 2015). Her dissertation, “Nineteenth-century Italian Ballet Music before National Unification: Sources, Style and Context,” covers largely uncharted territory in music and dance scholarship and draws on manuscripts from the Harvard Theatre Collection and the New York Public Library Research Collections. Dr. Ertz is the recipient of the 2011-2012 “John M. Ward Fellowship for Dance and Music for the Theatre” from the Houghton Library Visiting Fellowship Program at Harvard for the study entitled “Choreography and Music in the Ballets of Antonio Pallerini” in which she is examining the unique choreographic annotations and pictograms contained in some of Pallerini’s musical scores.