Music & Politics

Volume 15, Number 1

Winter 2021

Vanessa Cornett is the Director of Keyboard Studies at the University of St. Thomas (Minneapolis–St. Paul). She is author of The Mindful Musician: Mental Skills for Peak Performance(Oxford University Press, 2019); her international presentation venues include the Centre for the Study of International Governance and the Nobel Peace Prize Forum.

Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw completed her PhD in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2017. She currently holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada Post-doctoral Fellowship at the DAN School of Drama and Music, Queen’s

University, Canada. Her research focuses on public service broadcasting in multicultural contexts.

Patricia Hall is Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the general editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship(Oxford University Press, 2018), the author of two books on Berg’s sketches (UC Press, 1997 and Oxford University Press, 2011), and the co-editor with Friedemann Sallis of A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches(Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Leonard Lehrman is the composer, to date, of 252 works, including 12 operas, 7 musicals, 48 choral settings, and 284 songs—along with 64 translations, 18 adaptations, and 6 parodies—which have been heard on six continents. He has a BA cum laude in Music from Harvard College, an MFA and a DMA in Composition from Cornell University, a BM in Piano and MM in Conducting equivalencies from Indiana University, and an MSLS from Long Island University. He served as Assistant Chorus Master at the Metropolitan Opera from 1977 to 1978; became Studienleiter and Kapellmeister at Theater des Westens in Berlin, where he was the first Jew to conduct Fiddler on the Roof in that city; and founded the Jüdischer Musiktheaterverein Berlin in 1983. From 1989 to 1991, he produced “Music of All the Americas” over New York’s WBAI-FM. In 2014–15, he taught the first course in Jewish Opera at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Community Church of New York, and has been Organist/Choir Director and Composer-in-Residence for Christ Lutheran Church Rosedale and the Metropolitan Synagogue’s High Holidays since 2014. In 1991–98, he was the first President, and later the first Archivist, of the Long Island Composers Alliance. He edited the 3-volume Marc Blitzstein Songbook for Boosey & Hawkes, authored Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography for Greenwood, and co-authored (with Kenneth Boulton) Elie Siegmeister, American Composer: A Bio-Bibliography for Scarecrow. He also founded the Composer/Performer Roundtable of the Music Library Association. His 3500+ YouTube videos have had over 910,000 views (see tinyurl.com/ljlvideos), and his website is ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com.

Lena Leson is a doctoral candidate in historical musicology at the University of Michigan and the Assistant Editor of Music & Politics. Her research interests include 20th-century music for ballet in the United States, Europe, and Russia, and Cold War-era cultural exchange.