Rachel H. Rosenman

Thesis: Towards an Intermedial Poetics of Song: Studies in Twentieth-Century French Mélodie

Rachel H. Rosenman is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory. Her current dissertation project focuses on French lyric song around the turn of the twentieth century, considering certain composers’ personal musical aesthetics as a way to pursue broader questions about how poetry, music, and other art media can come together in song compositions. Specifically, her thesis analyzes works by the composers Erik Satie (1866–1925), Mel Bonis (1858–1937), and Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) as examples of experiments with the possibilities of art song that unite music, words, visual art, typography, and philosophy as inspiration sources and expressive means. Rachel’s other research interests include German art song, popular music in contemporary France, feminist approaches to music analysis, and relationships between music and language broadly conceived. She has presented her research in venues including the Society for Music Theory (SMT) annual meeting, the Royal Musical Association French Music Study Group inaugural annual conference, and the Hartt School Music Theory Colloquium.

Rachel holds a B.A. in Music and French Studies from Wesleyan University and an M.M. in Music Theory from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. At Harvard, Rachel is also pursuing a secondary field in Comparative Literature and has studied modern and contemporary literature and poetry in French and German.

Photo credit: Nicole Loeb