The Teams

2022 Researchers

Four students and one professor lined up against a wall for a photo

Left to right: Lizzie Gray ’25, Jack Slavik ’23, Davis Moore ’23, Ariana Raduege ’23, and Louis Epstein.

Not pictured: Maeve Nagel-Frazel (University of Denver ’23)

The Musical Geography Project is a collaborative, digital humanities, musicological research initiative initiated by Dr. Louis Epstein at St. Olaf College in 2015. Dr. Epstein and University of Denver undergraduate Maeve Nagel-Frazel collaboratively co-developed the 2022 Musical Geography project focused on the Washington Conservatory between January 2022 – May 2022. Intensive research on this project was undertaken during a ten-week period in summer 2022 by four St. Olaf undergraduate students, Jack Slavik, Ariana Raduege, Davis Moore, and Lizzie Gray, along with Maeve and Dr. Epstein. Maeve made an initial archival research trip to Washington, DC in June 2022, while Jack, Ariana, and Maeve conducted additional archival research in Washington, DC, in July 2022. To learn more about these researchers, click here.

2019 Researchers

Top row from left to right: Eric Holdhusen ’22, Benjamin Van Wienen ’20, Miles Broske ’19, Jacob West ’20,Ian Schipper ’20,Isaiah Pressman ’19. Bottom row from left to right:  William Beimers ’20, Reed Williams ’20, Thea Brenner ’20, Jessie Camp ’21, Annika Van Farowe ’19, Isabel Kramlinger ’21

In January 2019, students in the Directed Undergraduate Research course Music 396: Musical Geographies researched and visualized the life, career, and legacies of renowned singer, arranger, and publisher Harry Thacker Burleigh. The results of their collective work can be found at https://musicalgeography.org/project/the-life-and-legacy-of-h-t-burleigh-1866-1949/.

Thea Brenner

Rising Senior - Music and Media Studies

Thea is a Music and Media Studies major who is interested in the interactions between music and the way in which is it shared, listened to, and performed online. At St. Olaf she sings in the St. Olaf Choir, runs a radio show on KSTO, and is a member of the Music Entertainment Committee which puts on concerts during the school year. This summer, Thea is looking particularly at how race, of both the audience and the performer, functioned in the music of H.T. Burleigh’s lifetime and what broader implications this could have for understanding the current musical environment around Concert Spirituals. To read more, check out her blog posts here.

Reed Williams

Rising Senior - Music and Race & Ethnic Studies

In keeping with her major, Reed is interested in the ways that race influences the ways we hear, participate in, and understand music. As a classical pianist herself, she is especially fascinated by what the relationships between race and music mean for the future of the Western classical tradition and canon. This summer, Reed will continue a project from Interim 2019, to research and map H. T. Burleigh’s influence across the world. She will focus on visualizing the racial and sociopolitical environments that affected Burleigh and his peers during his lifetime, giving special attention to NYC where Burleigh spent the bulk of his career. Reed’s blog posts can be read here!

2017 Researchers

Above from left to right: Dr. Louis Epstein, Elizabeth Lacy ’19, Anna Perkins ’18, Juliette Emmanuel ’18, Siriana Lundgren ’19

Elizabeth Lacy

Rising Junior - French and Philosophy

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 Lundgren

Rising Junior - Music Performance and Elective Studies with focus in Women's and Gender Studies

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.

Anna Perkins

Rising Senior - Sociology/Anthropology and Russian

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.

Dr. Louis Epstein

Principal Investigator

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.

Juliette Emmanuel

Rising Senior - Political Science French and Gender Studies

Juliette is a rising senior, majoring in Political Science, French and Gender Studies. She is very passionate about French literature as well as finding connections between things. This summer, in addition to her work on the Musical Geography Project, she explored the history of Gospel through time and space, in the hope of understanding how changes within the African American culture have led to new forms of Gospel. You can find an overview of her project here and check out her blog posts to learn more about her research adventure.

2016 Researchers

Above from left to right: Dr. Louis Epstein, Samuel Parker, Carolyn Nuelle, Emily Hynes, Stella Li

Emily Hynes

Rising Junior - Vocal Performance Major

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.

Samuel Parker

Rising Junior - Music Enthusiast & Web Programmer

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

Rising Junior - Music and French Major

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.

Dr. Louis Epstein

Principal Investigator

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.

Stella Zhizhi Li

Rising Senior - Music Major

Stella is interested in wartime and interwar music history, and particularly enthusiastic about exploring the relation between music and social development, learning how music as a part of human civilization reflects social value and activates social change. This summer Stella works on reception study of the Second Viennese School in Paris and brings to this project a series of digital maps experimenting some musicological usage of interactive maps.

2015 Researchers

Katharina Biermann

Rising Junior - Art History & Medieval Studies Major

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.

Philip Claussen

Rising Senior - French and Music Education Major

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.

Natalie Kopp

Rising Junior - English Major

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.

Breanna Olson

Rising Senior - French Major

Breanna recently spent a semester in Paris, and is using her knowledge of the city and language to assist the team. She has enjoyed studying jazz music, the catacombs, and Russian émigrés in Paris, among other topics.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for funding and support from the following programs at St. Olaf College: Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (CURI) McNair/Trio Scholars Program Digital Humanities on the Hill (DHH). Thanks also to the following individuals: Susan Carlson (Program Coordinator for CURI, St. Olaf College) Beth Christensen (Music Librarian, St. Olaf College) Maggie Epstein (Access Services and Research Instruction, St. Olaf College) Rachel Frantsen (Digital Scholarship Intern, St. Olaf College) Kasia Gonnerman (Research Librarian, St. Olaf College) Ben Gottfried (Assistant Director of Instructional Technology, St. Olaf College) Timothy Maloney (Music Librarian, University of Minnesota) Jodi Malmgren (Director, International and Off-Campus Studies, St. Olaf College) Jason Menard (GIS Instructional Technologist, St. Olaf College), Sara Dale (GIS Instructional Technologist, St. Olaf College), Greg Muth (Program Director for CURI; Associate Professor of Chemistry, St. Olaf College), Kathy Tegtmeyer Pak (Program Director for CURI; Associate Professor of Chemistry, St. Olaf College), Jason Paul (Research Librarian, St. Olaf College) Dolores Peters (Project Director for DHH; Associate Professor of History, St. Olaf College) Kathy Tuma (Associate Director, International and Off-Campus Studies, St. Olaf College) Amy Roust (GIS Analyst, Douglas County, Kansas), Marti Newland (Executive Director and Co-Founder of the H.T. Burleigh Society), Lynne Foote (President and Co-Founder of the H.T. Burleigh Society), Jack Gieseking (Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky), Todd Decker (Associate Professor of Music, Washington University St. Louis).