As a French and Philosophy major, Elizabeth is compelled by language, culture, and history. Music also plays a large role in her life, as she participates in Chapel Choir, private voice lessons, and Hill Harmonics a cappella at St. Olaf. This summer, in addition to the Milhaud project, Elizabeth pursued research on The Fisk Jubilee Singers. She also went to Paris for two weeks to do archival research for the Milhaud project at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Check out her blog post about her experience.

Siriana is passionate about feminist musicology and hopes to pursue research on the interplay between feminist praxis and performance ethics. This summer, she researched Parisian salons of La Belle Époque and Les Années Folles. She enjoyed exploring the unique culture of salons during this period and hopes to expand her research from this summer into a larger project examining feminist praxis in the Digital Humanities. To read more about her research experience, check out her blog posts on our research blog.

As a musician and a scholar, Anna is interested in the ways music can be understood as an aesthetic/sensory experience, as well as part of the larger socio-cultural world. This summer, in addition to her contributions to the Milhaud project, she mapped the collection of Russian folk songs in the long 19th century, and created the digital storytelling project “Me, Milhaud, and the Motherland,” which explores and juxtaposes Milhaud’s 1926 trip to the USSR with her own experiences in Russia through images, sound, primary sources, and prose. Check out her blog posts to read more about her research experiences this summer.

A musicologist whose work focuses on the intersections of politics, patronage, and new music in 19th and 20th-century France, Louis Epstein has taught at St. Olaf College for three years. This summer’s iteration of the Musical Geography Project supports an article in progress on the German reception of Darius Milhaud’s music and upcoming conference presentations at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicology Society in Rochester, NY and at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Music in Kansas City, KS. When he isn’t sharing his passion for music, maps, and time travel with students and colleagues, he enjoys spending time with his wife, Maggie, and their two suspiciously angelic children, Rahm and Clio.

Emily has enjoyed researching the Ballets Russes and mapping over 2,000 of their performances. Additionally, she has enjoyed analyzing how different styles of maps tell different stories with the same data, and how maps can change how scholars have historically perceived past events. A story map in ArcGIS shows her efforts to compare both different mapping platforms and types of maps.

Sam brings a unique skillset to this project. This summer, he divided his time between researching Maurice Ravel’s Boléro and designing an SQL database used to store the performance data the team collected. He quickly became enamored of the digital humanities, and has enjoyed exploring new ways of storing, presenting, and sharing data on the web. As a student with a mild dislike of textbooks, he hopes to continue investigating the role of data visualization in academics and in the humanities.

Carolyn Nuelle is a rising junior majoring in Music and French. She has used her knowledge of the language to help her team find and use French sources, a task which included the opportunity to conduct research within several archives in Paris. In addition to archival work, her research this summer has focused on collecting and examining documented jazz venues and performances in 1920s Paris. She has enjoyed tackling a project that explores the overlapping connections between her major area.

A musicologist whose work focuses on the intersections of politics, patronage, and new music in 19th and 20th-century France, Louis Epsteinhas demonstrated a healthy obsession with maps since age 8. Later in life, he attempted to time travel by performing chamber music in a Parisian salon. This project felicitously combines all of his interests: French music, maps, and time travel.

In addition to being a linguaphile, Katharina belongs to that category of readers who spend as much time looking at the map at the front end of a novel as actually focusing on the text. She brings a creative, colorful perspective to the project, especially through her fictional series The Unsuspecting Tour Guide, which animates the venues and figures prominent on the map.

Having previously studied the use of music through both the French and Algerian revolutions, Philip continues to dig into both of his major interests as well as his fascination with geography and spatial analysis. During this project, Philip had the opportunity to use his French and Music skills to research 1924 Parisian music in a number of archives in Paris. Having also taken a particular interest in the frequency with which Beethoven’s works were performed, Philip has compiled and analyzed a great deal of data concerning what was performed where and by whom.

As an amateur musician, music history and modernist poetry enthusiast, and writing tutor, Natalie brings to the project scattered knowledge on related topics, writing and editing expertise, and a general desire to learn much more than this from her teammates. Her blog posts and research lanes for this project have included cinema, radio, and literary figures. She is also working on a series of short essays looking deeper into musical/literary connections.