Katherine Bergeron
Dean of the College and Professor of Music:
Music
Phone: +1 401 863 2573
Phone 2: +1 401 863 9800
Katherine_Bergeron@brown.edu
Katherine Bergeron is a professor of musicology, and currently serves as Dean of the College. Her research interests include French cultural history, musical modernism, the discipline of musicology, experimental music, song, opera, poetry and film. Bergeron is the author of Decadent Enchantments (University of California Press, 1998); Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (University of Chicago Press, 1992). She most recently completed Voice Lessons: A Cultural Study of Mélodie.
Biography
Katherine Bergeron took the Ph.D. in Music at Cornell University in 1989 and taught at the University of North Carolina, Tufts University, and the University of California at Berkeley before coming to Brown in 2004, where she was a professor of musicology and chair of the Department of Music. In 2006, Bergeron was appointed as Dean of the College, Brown's highest undergraduate academic office.
In her scholarship she has specialized in the vocal repertories of turn-of-the-century France. Her book, Decadent Enchantments (University of California Press, 1998), was a study of the 19th-century revival of plainchant by French Benedictine monks, and won the Deems-Taylor Award from ASCAP in 1999. She recently completed Voice Lessons, a history of the French mélodie in the years around 1900. In addition, Bergeron is a singer of eclectic tastes. She has performed Gregorian chant and the blues, the court music of central Java and contemporary pop music, as well as the experimental vocal idioms associated with the 20th century avant-garde.
Interests
My newest book, Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque (Oxfprd 2009) examines the modern musical art known as la mélodie française and its rise to prominence in the years around 1900. This was a period when France was pouring resources into national literacy and French scholars were beginning to grasp the nuances of the spoken tongue. I explore the relationship between the free, secular, and compulsory school system of the Third Republic, and the experimental sciences of language that grew alongside it, to observe the ways in which both science and school redefined the verbal arts in France at century's end.
The music of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel; the writings of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; the performances of Maggie Teyte, Reynaldo Hahn, and Sarah Bernhardt; the linguistic studies of Paul Passy and Abbé Rousselot: all these sources offer evidence of the new ideas of expression that proliferated during one of the most idealistic moments in French musical history, when poets, composers, actors, singers, and scientists all learned to imagine-and to speak-their language in new ways. Through close readings of songs, poems, sound recordings, and other historical records, Voice Lessons narrates the development of a rare musical art, seeking to explain why this art emerged, why it mattered, and why it eventually disappeared.
For more information about the book and the companion website see http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryWorld/European/France/?view=usa&ci=9780195337051
Awards
1980 Phi Beta Kappa, Wesleyan University.
1994 Junior Faculty Mentor Grant, University of California at Berkeley,
1995 Faculty Award for Outstanding Woman Assistant Professor, University of California at Berkeley
1997 Promoted to Tenure, University of California at Berkeley
1999 Deems-Taylor Award for Decadent Enchantments, American Society of Composers, Publishers and Authors
1999 Finalist, Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California at Berkeley
2006 Appointed as dean of the College, Brown University
Affiliations
Editorial Board, Representations, (Journal on history, literature and the arts), published by University of California Press, 1996-present
Advisory Board, Repercussions, Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley, 1993-2004.
American Musicological Society, program committee, Winter 1998; General Council, 1997-99; Nominating Committee, 2002. Publications committee, 2006.
Program board, Berkeley Early Music Festival, 1995-2001
Reviewer, American Council of Learned Societies, 1999-2005
Funded Research
1986-87 American Association of University Women. American Fellowship (for dissertation), $8000
1991-92 Dean's Research Grant, Tufts University (for initial work on first book), $15,000
1995 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship (for book, Decadent Enchantments), $4000
1995 Prytanean Faculty Award, University of California at Berkeley (for book, Decadent Enchantments), $10,000
1995 Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship, University of California at Berkeley (for book, Decadent Enchantments), $8000
1998-99 Sabbatical Grant, University of California at Berkeley (for initial work on second book), 45% of salary
1999 Committee on Research, Faculty research grant, University of California at Berkeley (for second book, Voice Lessons), $4000
2001 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Associate Professors, American Council of Learned Societies (for book, Voice Lessons, deferred to academic year 2002-03), $65,000
2001 President's Research Fellowship, University of California (for book, Voice Lessons), $25,000
2001 Mellon Fellowship, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (for book, Voice Lessons), $3000
Web Links
Curriculum Vitae
Download Katherine Bergeron's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format
