Elaine R. Fitz Gibbon is a historical musicologist with a focus on the intersections of experimental music and art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. After training as a Germanist (Princeton University, MA 2017), she received her PhD in historical musicology with a secondary field in American Studies from Harvard University in 2024. Her dissertation explored the emergence of instrumental theater as a vehicle for social critique in the collaborative works of Mauricio Kagel and Ursula Burghardt in the mid-twentieth century, and the genre’s resurgence in the twenty-first century. Publications of her scholarly work have appeared in the edited collection Material Cultures of Music Notation, the Paul Sacher Foundation’s Mitteilungen, The Opera Quarterly, and Current Musicology.
Areas of Expertise
20th c. (West) German History & Culture
German Jewish Diaspora, between Germany and Argentina
Post-Shoa Experiences of Return amongst the German Jewish Diaspora
Avant-garde Music and musical experimentalism, 20th-21st centuries
Opera and Musiktheater
Disability and the body in West Germany
Education
PhD, Historical Musicology, Harvard University
MA, German Studies, Princeton University
BA, Music & German Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Publications
“Reevaluating Political Musiktheater and Reversing Colonialist History: Mauricio Kagel’s Mare Nostrum (1975),” Journal of the American Musicological Society 77, no. 3 (2024). Forthcoming.
“Ereignisse erforschen, Freundschaften stiften. Das Kölner Labor e. V. (1968–1973),” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 186, no. 1 (2025). Forthcoming.
“Opera and Conceptual Art: An Interview with Jennifer Walshe,” The Opera Quarterly: Experiments in Opera Today. Edited by Heather Wiebe and David Gutkin. Forthcoming.
“Ursula Burghardt – artista plástica judío-argentina-alemana / Ursula Burghardt – Jewish Argentine German Artist,” jewishlatinamerica: América Latina Judía/Latino-America Judaica/Jewish Latin America (blog). 28 August 2024.
“Crooked Plane(s): Friendship as Compositional Medium in the Labor e. V.’s 5-Tage-Rennen (1968),” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 37 (2024): 32-38.
“Encyclopaedias and Empty Staves: Re-reading Music in Hanne Darboven’s Quartett ›88‹.” Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription. Edited by Emily Payne and Floris Schuiling, 31-49. London: Routledge, 2022.
“Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969),” Current Musicology 107 (2021): 29-61.
Translator, “Leon Cavallo’s Pagliacci and Modern-Realistic Opera by Hans Merian.” Puccini and His World. Edited by Arman Schwartz and Emanuele Senici, 273-290. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Co-translator with Emily Richmond Pollock, “Auditions: Four Texts by Bernd Alois Zimmermann,” The Opera Quarterly: Opera and the Avant-Garde 30, no. 1 (2014): 135-151.