After completing her undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Vienna (including a year at New York University), Elisabeth worked on a PhD at the University of Cambridge (completed in 2012). She then held a post-doc position at the University of Salzburg as part of a larger research project, on music printing in German-speaking lands. On 1 January 2015 Elisabeth started a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at King’s, with a project entitled Owners and Users of Early Music Books. Elisabeth has also worked as an external lecturer at the University of Cambridge, University of Salzburg, and Royal Holloway University.

Teaching 

Elisabeth has taught undergraduate courses at all levels, focusing on the music and sources of the early modern period up to Bach. She has also supervised a range of courses from Machaut to the 20^th century and taught postgraduate level at the Rare Books School, University of London.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Music and sound of the Renaissance
• Music printing and manuscript cultures
• Material culture and material texts
• Cultural transfer
• Music and confessionalisation

The production, dissemination and reception of music in the 16th and 17th centuries stand at the centre of Elisabeth’s past and current research. Her PhD thesis explored the printed dissemination of Italian sacred music in German-speaking areas, with an emphasis on the music book as a cultural product and material object, which provides a window into the world of cultural transfer. Her research also expands to the production of various types of music books, such as theory books, pamphlets of occasional music and liturgical publications, with a particular focus on the influence of confessionalisation on the production and reception of music.

Her current research investigates the users of these publications; in this context “use” is being defined very widely to include collecting, silent reading, annotating, and performance as some potential interactions of the early modern “reader” with a music book.

For more details, please see her full research profile.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Elisabeth's other musical passion is contemporary opera and she has worked with the Bregenz opera festival, writing and editing programme books, giving pre-performance lectures and organising outreach events. In recent years this work has included the organisation of a symposium on the life and work of André Tchaikowsky (1935-1982) and a series of interviews with the Austrian composer HK Gruber (born 1943).

Selected publications

 

• ‘Reading the Melopoiae (1507): a search for its owners and users’, in Moveable Type: Music, Mobility, and the Material Cultures of Print in Early Modern Europe, edited by Lindmayr-Brandl, A. & McDonald, G. (eds.), (London: Routledge, fortchoming).
• ‘Manuscript and print combined: Re-discovered manuscript additions in the Kraków copy of Peter Schöffer’s third songbook (1536).’ In ‘Teutsche Liedlein‘ des 16. Jahrhunderts edited by Susanne Rode-Breymann and Achim Aurnhammer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018).
• ‘Printing, Politics, and Power: Music printing in bi-confessional Frankfurt.’ In Music and theology in the European Reformations,’ edited by David Burn and Grantley McDonald (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018)
• Music printing in German-speaking lands, edited with Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl and Grantley McDonald (London: Routledge, 2018).