Prof. Julie E. Cumming

Member

Biography

Julie E. Cumming is a musicologist at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal.  She was a recorder player involved with Amherst early music in the 1970s and 80s. She received her BA in Music and Medieval Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, and her MA and PhD in Music and Medieval Studies at UC Berkeley.  She taught at Wellesley College from 1985 to 1992, where she directed the collegium.  She is the author of The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (1999). Recent publications include “From Two-Part Framework to Movable Module,” in Medieval Music in Practice: Studies in Honor of Richard Crocker, ed. Judith Peraino (2013); and “Renaissance Improvisation and Musicology,” Music Theory Online (2013). She was the principal investigator on the Digging into Data Challenge Grant, “Electronic Locator of Vertical Interval Successions (ELVIS): The first large data-driven research project on musical style” (2012-13) (elvisproject.ca): we developed a searchable online repository of scores in symbolic notation, as well as software for analysis of counterpoint. With her McGill Colleague Ichiro Fujinaga she leads the SIMSSA Project: Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (simssa.ca), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. The aim of the project is to create "Google Scores" (without Google): using optical music recognition technology and sophisticated search and analysis tools. Her fields of expertise include the motet; compositional process in the Renaissance; improvisation and historical pedagogy in the Renaissance; music paleography and singing from old notation; manuscripts and prints; and digital humanities in music.