James Edward Ditson Professor of Music
Affiliate, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Graduate Advisor in Musicology
Historical Musicology
acshreff@fas.harvard.edu
Music Building 301S
617-494-7742
Anne C. Shreffler’s research interests include the musical avant-garde after 1945 in Europe and America, with special emphasis on the political and ideological associations of new music. Other research interests include historiography, composers in emigration, performance theory, and contemporary opera.
Topics of Shreffler’s recent articles include the canonization processes in twentieth century music; tradition and rupture in Beethoven and Webern; and different models for politically progressive music in the twentieth century. She co-edited (with David Trippett) a themed issue of the German journal Musiktheorie on Rudolf Kolisch in America. Shreffler is currently working on a book project, entitled “Musical Utopias: Progressive Music and Progressive Politics in the Twentieth Century” (under contract with University of California Press).
Shreffler began her research career studying the Austrian composer Anton Webern (the topic of her dissertation), has published widely on this composer, including a book, Webern and the Lyric Impulse: Songs and Fragments on Poems by Georg Trakl (Oxford University Press, 1994) as well as the article “‘Mein Weg geht jetzt vorueber’: The Vocal Origins of Webern’s Twelve-Tone Composition,” for which she received the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society in 1995.
Shreffler has also written about the music and thought of Elliott Carter, including Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents (The Boydell Press, 2008), co-authored with Felix Meyer. A co-edited volume with Felix Meyer, Carol Oja, and Wolfgang Rathert, Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000 (The Boydell Press, 2014), resulted from an international conference held at Harvard and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. A new article, “Maderna Goes to Tanglewood: The Role of American Networks in the Origins and Reception of Venetian Journal and Satyricon,” is forthcoming in the volume Utopia, Innovation, Tradition: Bruno Maderna’s Cosmos, edited by Angela Ida de Benedictis and published by the Paul Sacher Foundation.
Shreffler received a B.Mus. in flute performance in 1979 from New England Conservatory, a Master’s in music theory from the same institution, and Ph.D.in musicology from Harvard; this was immediately followed by an Assistant Professorship at the University of Chicago. From 1994 until 2003 she was a professor at the Musikwissenschaftliches Institut of the University of Basel in Switzerland. She has taught at Harvard since the fall of 2003. Shreffler serves on advisory and editorial boards of a number of musicological journals and institutions in the U.S., Germany, and Switzerland, including the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel and the journal Archiv für Musikwissenschaft. She has been elected Vice President of the American Musicological Society and will serve 2014–16. She has also served on several committees of the American Musicological Society including the AMS Council, the AMS-50 Fellowship Committee, and the Program Committee. In 2007–08 she was the recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Anne Shreffler’s website