Associate Professor
zazulia@berkeley.edu
My research focuses on Medieval and Renaissance music—in particular, the intersection of musical style, complex notation, and intellectual history. My first book, Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing (Oxford, 2021), is a wide-ranging study of notational aesthetics in polyphonic music, ca. 1340–1510. For fifteenth-century composers, musical notation assumed a significance that would not be matched until the 20th century. In telling this story, I account for changes in thinking about music theory that made possible later modes of composition so invested in music’s written form. By reconsidering the role of notation, I engage with questions of performance, transmission, ontology, and a late-medieval aesthetics that includes sight as well as sound. Some of my current projects include the nature and meaning of difficulty in fifteenth-century music, repertories that cross the boundaries of the “sacred” and “secular”, “courtly” and “popular”, and in particular the ways they unsettle those categories. My past publications publications have focused on the role of obscenity in 15th-century song, the L’homme armé tradition, the history of music theory, and Du Fay’s Nuper rosarum flores.
I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a Dean’s Scholar and a Mellon graduate research fellow with the Penn Humanities Forum. My dissertation was supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2012) and an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship (2012). I also had the pleasure of spending a semester at Villa I Tatti as a graduate reader (2010). My current book project has been made possible by a fellowship from the the National Endowment for the Humanities (2015) and an ACLS fellowship, with the additional distinction of being named the first McClary-Walser fellow in music studies (2019), plus a research fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America (2020). In addition to teaching in the music department, I serve on the advisory board of Berkeley’s program in Medieval Studies. and am affiliated with the program in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2016, I taught at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pennsylvania, and Haverford College.
Book
Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing. AMS Studies in Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Articles and Chapters
“Pierre de la Rue’s Missa Alleluya and the Transmission of Transformations.” In La Rue Studies, ed. David Burn, Honey Meconi, and Christiane Wiesenfeldt. Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming.
“Out of Proportion: Nuper rosarum flores and the Danger of False Exceptionalism.” Journal of Musicology 36 (2019): 131–66.
“Composing in Theory: Busnoys, Tinctoris, and the L’homme armé Tradition.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71 (2018): 1–73.
“A Motet Ahead of Its Time? The Curious Case of Portio nature/Ida capillorum.” In A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, ed. Jared Hartt, 341–54. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2018.
“Whatever you do, don’t sing D”: On the notation of Obrecht’s Missa L’homme armé.” In Qui musicam in se habet: Studies in honor of Alejandro Enrique Planchart, ed. Anna Zayaruznaya, Bonnie Blackburn, and Stanley Boorman, 731–41. American Institute of Musicology, 2015.
“The Transformative Impulse.” In The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin, 587–601. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
“Updating Puyllois’s Missa Sine nomine.” In L’ars nova Italiana del Trecento, vol. VIII, ed. Marco Gozzi, Agostino Ziino, and Francesco Zimei, 489–504. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2014.
“‘Corps contre corps’, Voix contre voix: Conflicting Codes of Discourse in the Combinative Chanson,” Early Music 38 (2010): 347–60.
Teaching
Music 27 (Introduction to Western Music)
Music 70 (History of Music)
Music 128 (Love and Love Songs in the Middle Ages)
Music 170 (Josquin)
Music 170 (Medieval Motets in Manuscript)
Music 170A (Singing Early Music)
Music 220 (Motets of the 14th Century)
Music 220 (The L’homme armé Tradition)
Music 220 (Song Masses and the Problem of the Secular)
Education
B.A. (Music), Harvard University, 2006
Ph.D. (Music), University of Pennsylvania, 2012