Jamuna Samuel

BA/MA Music, Yale Univ.; PhD Music, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

I have been Lecturer in Music at Penn since January 2014. Previous positions include those at Stony Brook University and Wellesley College, and as visiting faculty in the graduate program of Theory/Composition at Rutgers University. My publications have dealt with interdisciplinary issues concerning twentieth-century music, especially in Italy and the United States. Other research and teaching interests include film music and sound, performance/analysis issues, and listening in literature (in particular in Calvino/Berio). I have taught and advised on a range of topics, including tonal and post-tonal theory, analysis, and form; twentieth-century music history; performance/analysis/history (in collaboration with the Daedalus Quartet, pianist Yu Xi Wang, and composer Anna Weesner); Italian popular and folk traditions; the role of performers and institutions in music history; and film music and sound (cross listed with Cinema Studies and Italian Studies).

Revisiting issues of influence and intertextuality from an interdisciplinary perspective, my current project involves the work and ideas of Luigi Dallapiccola, investigating his impact on subsequent generations of the Italian and American avant-garde. I focus on text-music analysis, interweaving it with historical-political considerations and ultimately with a Gramscian interpretation of issues of ethics and aesthetics. My research has been funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation, Stony Brook University, and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for research in Venice.
 
Publications include those appearing in Rivista di analisi e teoria musicale, Intersections, Singing Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera (eds. Shafter and Decker), Luigi Dallapiccola: Politics, Text and Musical Thought (eds. Illiano and Sala, forthcoming) and from the conference Utopian Listening: The Late Electroacoustic Music of Luigi Nono: Technologies, Aesthetics, Histories, Futures (forthcoming), among others. Review essays include those appearing in Indiana Theory Review and Gamut. Paper presentations include those given at the national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, and at international meetings devoted to 20th-century Italian music.

In 2018, in collaboration with Penn’s Music Library and Kislak Center (Marian Anderson Collection), I co-organized and presented Sound, Gender, and the Color Line, a series of interrelated events including a one-day scholarly conference, a performance open to the public, and school outreach for Stanton Elementary and Junior High students. This event, commemorating the 25-year anniversary of Marian Anderson’s death, was made possible with the support of several institutions across campus, including the Center for Africana Studies and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality. 
 
Beyond Penn, I am currently board vice-president of Philadelphia’s Network for New Music (dedicated to performing works of living composers). I have served as Secretary of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic (MTSMA) (2016-18).  In 2016, I organized a one-week interdisciplinary and inter-institutional exploration of the music of Berio, entitled Circles Around Sinfonia, including lectures, classes, panel discussion, and performances,  in collaboration with The Curtis Institute of Music, Temple University, and Bowerbird. 

I am resident faculty of Rodin College House. Related to my joint roles in the Department and the College House, I am involved with Penn’s Music Fellows programs; I served on the founding committees and continue on the selection committee.