Dr. Elaine Fitz Gibbon

Elaine R. Fitz Gibbon is a historical musicologist with a focus on the intersections of experimental music and art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current book project, Visible Musics: Instrumental Theater and Community in Postwar West Germany, explores the development of instrumental theater in postwar West Germany, an experimental genre at the intersection of music, theater, and the visual arts that arose through the collaboration of artists such as composer and filmmaker Mauricio Kagel, sculptor and sound artist Ursula Burghardt de Kagel, actor and filmmaker Alfred Feussner, baritone and poet William Pearson, and bassist, composer, and Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson. Using archival and ethnographic methodologies, Fitz Gibbon’s scholarship explores forms of musicking that question traditional notions of expertise, transmission, and mediation, blurring boundaries between traditionally rigid categories of composer, performer, and audience.

Publications of Fitz Gibbon’s scholarly work include “Reevaluating Political Musiktheater and Reversing Colonialist History: Mauricio Kagel’s Mare Nostrum (1975)” in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, “Jennifer Walshe on Opera, Music Theater, and Collaboration: An Interview with Elaine Fitz Gibbon” in The Opera Quarterly, “Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969)” in Current Musicology, “Crooked Plane(s): Friendship as Compositional Medium in the Labor e. V.’s 5-Tage-Rennen (1968)” in the Paul Sacher Foundation’s Mitteilungen, and ““Encyclopaedias and Empty Staves: Re-reading Music in Hanne Darboven’s Quartett ›88‹” in the edited collection Material Cultures of Music Notation (Routledge, 2022). Additionally, her scholarly translations have appeared in The Opera Quarterly (as co-translator together with Emily Richmond Pollock: “Auditions: Four Texts by Bernd Alois Zimmermann”), and in Arman Schwartz and Emanuele Senici’s Puccini and His World (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Fitz Gibbon’s research has been generously supported by fellowships and awards from institutions including the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the AMS William F. Holmes/Frank D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies, the AMS Suzanne G. Cusick Professional Development Fund, the AMS Harold Powers World Travel Fund, the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA) Edna Aizenberg Research Award, the Paul Sacher Foundation, the Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale’s (RIdIM) Lloyd Old and Constance Old Award in Music, Dance & Theatre in Visual Culture, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, amongst others.

After beginning her training as a cellist at the New England Conservatory, Fitz Gibbon completed her BA in music and German Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, received an MA in German Studies from Princeton University, and completed her PhD in historical musicology with a secondary field in American Studies at Harvard University.