Tamara Levitz

Professor
Department: Musicology
tlevitz@humnet.ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Cuba

Tamara Levitz is a musicologist from Montréal, Canada who currently holds a position as Professor of Musicology at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. She has published widely on musical modernism in Germany, Cuba, Senegal, and France in the 1920s and 30s. Combining extensive archival research with acute critical interpretation, Levitz explores in her work the artistic intentions, complex motivations, sexual and gender identifications, and intricate social relations of musicians, composers, critics, ethnographers, performers, and audiences involved in historical events of musical performance.

Much of her work has focused on renowned artists, including Ferruccio Busoni, John Cage, Igor Stravinsky, and André Gide. Her most recent monograph, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (Oxford, 2012), presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere by Ida Rubinstein of André Gide’s and Igor Stravinsky’s melodrama Perséphone on 30 April 1934.