Giulia Accornero

Theory
accornero@g.harvard.edu
Thesis:
 Measured Music: Diagrammatics of Musical Time from Baghdad to Paris, 850-1350

Giulia Accornero is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Harvard University (’23), with a secondary field in Medieval Studies. She holds degrees in economics (BS, 2010) and musicology (BA, 2013; MA, 2016), and was a Graduate Fellow at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Spring 2020. Her dissertation “Measured Music: Diagrammatics of Musical Time from Baghdad to Paris, 850–1350” centers on the medieval greater Mediterranean, and draws on media theory in examining attempts to reify and control musical time in both Islamicate and Christianate sources. In recent years, she has given papers at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory, Society for Ethnomusicology, Renaissance Society of America, and International Musicological Society.

She also writes about music, sound, and media from the twentieth century through today:

2022. “What Does ASMR Sound Like? Composing the Proxemic Intimate Zone in Contemporary Music.Contemporary Music Review 41 (4): 337-357. 

2022. “Was 1974 The End of Music History? Universalism, Cybernetics, and the International Conference of New Music Notation.” In F. Schuling & E. Payne, ed. Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription, 14–30. London: Routledge.

2021. “Shocking Intimacy: Techniques, Technologies, and Aesthetics of Amplification in Clara Iannota’s ‘Intent on Resurrection.’” Sound Stage Screen 1 (2): 5–33.

2018. “Un’Organologia Critica per una Nuova Liuteria.Quaderni del Conservatorio 7: 13–24.

2016. “La fenomenologia musicale di Sergiu Celibidache.Quaderni del Conservatorio 5:  86-138.

Since January 2020 she is co-curator (with Siavash Sabetrohani) of the AMS/SMT History of Music Theory blog. In 2022, her project tartīb, a landing page that aims to lower entry barriers to the study of Arabic music theory (750-1300 CE), was awarded grants by the AMS and the Medieval Academy of America. The page will be launched in 2024. Since 2022 she has also co-chaired the AMS Notation, Inscription, and Visualization Study Group, which she co-founded with Ginger Dellenbaugh in the same year.