Academic Interests and Areas of Expertise
Research interests include the music of Leonard Bernstein, American musical theater, topical theory and musical meaning, jazz historiography and reception and American musical modernism
Professional Background
Katherine Baber earned a Bachelor of Music in clarinet performance and a Ph.D. in musicology from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and is an active scholar of twentieth-century music and American musical culture. Her dissertation, Leonard Bernstein’s Jazz: Musical Topic and Cultural Resonance, explored the reception and meaning of Leonard Bernstein’s use of jazz and blues in works for the stage and concert hall. She is author of the Oxford Bibliography Online entry on Leonard Bernstein. Other publications and research include the interaction of African American music and Jewish identity, models of deliberation and democracy in the music of Charles Ives, the role of
jazz and popular song in World War II propaganda, and field research on the commoditization of Chicago blues.
Courses Offered at Redlands
- MUS 233: American Music
- MUS 300: Music History and Literature from Antiquity to 1750
- MUS 301: Music History and Literature from 1750 to the Present
- MUS 403/603: Baroque Music
- MUS 404/604: Classic Music
- MUS 405/605: Romantic Music
- MUS 406/606: Twentieth-Century Music Literature
- MUS 600: Graduate Studies in Scholarship and Analysis
Education
B.M., Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University
Ph.D. in Musicology, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University
Previous Teaching Experience
Visiting Lecturer, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University (Summer, 2008)
Professional Experience
Assistant Music Editor, Indiana University Press (2007-2009)
Publications
“Leonard Bernstein.” In Oxford Bibliographies Online: Music. Ed. Bruce Gustafson. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
“Jazz, World War II Radio Propaganda, and the Case of Tokyo Rose”
The Soundtrack of Conflict: The Role of Music in Radio Broadcasting in Wartime and in Conflict
Situations, University of Goettingen, September 15, 2011
“Jazz and the Politics of Identity in
Bernstein's New York Musicals”
Classic Broadway and Those Who Built It, Susan Porter
Symposium, University of Colorado, Boulder, October 3, 2010
“Jazz as a Rhetoric of Conflict in Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony no. 2”
Society for American Music Conference, March 18, 2010
CD Review: Illumination, by Earth, Wind & Fire (Sanctuary: 2005). Black Grooves (July 7, 2006).
www.blackgrooves.org
“Music and Identity in Mel Brooks#s The Producers.” Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter 35/2
(Spring, 2006): 6-7.
Honors and Awards
Walter Kaufmann Prize, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, 2010
Professional Affiliations
- American Musicological Society
AMS Pacific Southwest Chapter
- Society for American Music