Kristina Muxfeldt is professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She taught previously for a decade at Yale University and has given guest seminars in music history at Princeton University and the University of Illinois (Urbana). Her scholarship is focused on European culture in the turbulent decades near the turn of the nineteenth century.
Her book Vanishing Sensibilities: Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann (Oxford, 2011) probes portrayals in opera, song, and theater of changing societal constructs (three-way marriage, same-sex passion, womankind, liberty), with special attention paid to oblique communication occasioned by censorship, and musical representations of memory. Recent publications include “Schubert’s Freedom of Song, if Not Speech” in Franz Schubert and His World (Princeton, 2014) and “Happy and Sad: Robert Schumann’s Art of Ambiguity” in Word, Image, and Song, Vol. 2: Essays on Musical Voices (Rochester, 2013). A current study concerns the reception by composers and critics of a memorable moment in Rossini’s music.
Other writings have appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, The Literature of German Romanticism (Camden House), The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, Notes, British Association of Romantic Studies Review, and Schumann: The Early Romantic Composers Series (Ashgate).
