Email: ccoppola@hunter.cuny.edu
Office: Room 400G Hunter North
Phone: 212-650-3784
Spring 2023 Advising Hours:
Mondays, 11:45AM – 12:45PM & Thursdays, 4:00 – 5:00PM
‘See personal website:’
https://catherinecoppola.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Catherine Coppola is a musicologist and Chair of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program. She teaches core courses and those of her own design such as Reframing Opera: Gender, Race, Class; Musical Quotation and Allusion; and Women and Power in Mozart’s Operas. On the latter, her ASECS presentation, “Fallacies of Context and Change,” was lauded as “a brilliant critique of contemporary engagement with Mozart’s women” in the conference review for Eighteenth-Century Music (March 2020).
Coppola’s articles have been published in 19th-Century Music, The Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America, The Journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship, and Teaching Music, and she contributed to an article on Francesca da Rimini for Smithsonian Magazine. An invited speaker at the Venice International Conference on Improvisation and Open Forms, her presentation on “Didacticism and Display in the Capriccio and Prelude for Violin, 1785-1840” was published in Musical Improvisation and Open Forms in the Age of Beethoven, ed. Gianmario Borio and Angela Carone, Routledge (2018). Forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, edited by Jessica Waldoff, is her invited chapter, “Dialogue as Essence in The Magic Flute.” She is currently at work on two book projects related to dramatic music and its essential relevance in performance and in curricula.
Invited lectures include the keynote presentation, “Opera and its Discontents: Reflections Of/On the Canon” for the Annual Symposium on Music Research at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University (2022), where Dr. Coppola also conducted a workshop with doctoral students on “Doing Meaningful Musicology with Canonic Opera”; “Why We Need Mozart Now More Than Ever” for the Musicology Bytes series at the CUNY Graduate Center (2021) and for the Don Wright Faculty of Music Graduate Colloquium at the University of Western Ontario (2020); as well as her invited roundtable, “Confronting Race in The Magic Flute” for the Study Session of the Mozart Society of America (2020). The conversation continued in her ASECS roundtable, “Painting the Moor Green: Confronting Race and Gender in The Magic Flute” (2021).
Recent conference papers: “A Context for Gender Equivalence in Cosí fan tutte,” American Musicological Society, Boston (2019); “Historical Residue or Modern Practice? In Defense of the Text for The Magic Flute,” Mozart Society of America panel, Mozart’s Magic Flute: in His Time and Ours, July 20, 2019, in conjunction with the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center; “Fallacies of Context and Change: Why We Need Mozart’s Women Now More Than Ever,” for The Long Shadow of Sexism: Reading the Eighteenth Century in (the) Light of #MeToo, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Denver (2019); “Women and Power in Mozart’s Operas,” Pedagogy Caucus on Teaching the Eighteenth Century: A Poster Session, ASECS-Denver (2019); “Fear of Feminine Power: Hillary Clinton and the Queen of the Night,” Music and Politics, AMS—GNY (2015). Earlier presentations include “Source and Reception in Busoni’s Fantasia nach Bach,” biennial meeting of the American Bach Society, Rutgers University; “Affinities between Busoni’s Music and the Native-American Sources for his Indian Fantasy” for AMS-NY; “The Working Relationship between Elliott Carter and Bernard Greenhouse: Implications Regarding Issues of Text and Performance” for the International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship; and “The Elusive Fantasy” for AMS-NY.
Elected to the Board of Directors of the Mozart Society of America (2022-2025) and to the Thomas Hunter Honors Council, Coppola was also invited to join the roster of pre-concert lecturers for Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series, as well as to serve the college as a Gender Studies Affiliate. In addition to the PhD in musicology from the CUNY Graduate Center, she holds the MM in piano performance from the Manhattan School of Music, having studied principally with Seymour Lipkin, and in master classes with Gary Graffman and Menahem Pressler. Recent collaborative performances include Grieg songs with Susan Gonzalez; violin sonatas of Strauss and Brahms with Lucy Morganstern; songs of Pauline Viardot and Chopin with Stephanie Jensen-Moulton; and song cycles by Schumann and Richard Burke with National Opera Association Director Paul Houghtaling. Prof. Coppola has also appeared as soloist with the Bloomfield Symphony Orchestra and with the Rockland Symphony.
