Blake Howe

Paula G. Manship Professor of Musicology

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Biography

Blake Howe is the Paula G. Manship Professor of Musicology at Louisiana State University. He teaches courses and seminars on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, film music, and performance practice for graduate students, and introduction and survey courses for undergraduates. Recent seminars have included Franz Schubert: Inside, Out; Music and Disability Studies; and Music and Poetry of the German Lied. He has served as co-director of LSU’s Collegium Musicum.

With co-author Brett Boutwell, he is writing a textbook titled The Musician in Society (forthcoming from W. W. Norton), based on a course that he helped to develop at LSU. The book is notable for its innovative structure. It features nearly 100 case studies of musicians throughout history and around the globe, and these musicians are grouped together by the roles that they played in their musical communities and traditions: for example, the roles of the instrument maker, teacher, composer, performer, patron, or facilitator.

His research interests are diverse and include nineteenth-century German song, Disability Studies, and film music. He has published on these and other topics in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, The Journal of Musicology, The Musical Quarterly, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and Music Research Annual, and he has contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body (Oxford University Press), The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s “Winterreise” (Cambridge University Press), and Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style (Cambridge University Press).

He is co-editor, with Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, Joseph N. Straus, of The Oxford Handbook on Music and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press), and co-convenor of the colloquy “On the Disability Aesthetics of Music” (Journal of the American Musicological Society).

He has contributed book and recording reviews to Music and Letters, Notes, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and his blog posts have appeared on Musicology Now (American Musicological Society) and The Avid Listener (W. W. Norton). He has presented papers at a number of national and international conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, the Society for American Music, the Society for Music Analysis, and the Society for Disability Studies. He served as editor of recording reviews for Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge University Press) and as chair of the American Musicological Society’s Study Group on Music & Disability.

In honor of his research, teaching, and service, he has been awarded the LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award, the LSU Alumni Association Rising Faculty Research Award, the Tiger Athletic Foundation President’s Award, and the Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Awards. He is President-Elect of the Southern Chapter of the American Musicological Society.