Tamara Levitz is a musicologist from Montréal, Canada who currently holds a position as Professor of Comparative Literature 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. She recently completed the monograph Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (Oxford, 2012), in which she presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere by Ida Rubinstein of André Gide’s and Igor Stravinsky’s melodrama Perséphone on 30 April 1934.
Levitz is currently the scholar in residence for the Bard Festival on “Stravinsky and His World,” and is editing a volume of the same name to be published by Princeton University Press to coincide with the festival in August 2013.
