Joel Schwindt

My goal is to offer every student a path to performance that transcends the reproduction of a musical artifact or tradition. Through the study of musical history, students can understand not only the confluence of cultural and personal factors that led artists of the past and present to create great music, but also the many ways these creative catalysts continue to exist in today’s world, allowing them to engage history in the here and now.

Joel Schwindt joined the Conservatory in 2015 and is an associate professor of core studies. He previously served on the instructional staff of Harvard University, Boston University, and Brandeis University. Schwindt has developed and taught seminars on gender representation and cultural “othering” in opera, the artistic and sociological relationship between classical and pop music, the “voice of the refugee” in music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as humanism and class rivalry in the music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Schwindt’s research focuses on two primary topics. One encompasses humanism, learned societies, and class rivalry in Italian and French music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The other considers religious philosophy, class rivalry, and racial identity in country music, which is the focus of his current project (working title: Real Country / True Religion: Resonances Between the Fundamentalist-Evangelical Split and Debates on Authenticity in Country Music). He has presented papers at national meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, in addition to various regional conferences. Selected publications include his monograph on Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Orpheus in the Academy: Monteverdi’s First Opera; the Accademia degli Invaghiti (Routledge, 2021), an article on Orpheus’s use of oratory in the same work from the 2014 volume of the Cambridge Opera Journal; and an edition of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s In nativitatem Domini canticum (H. 416), published by Bärenreiter in 2011. He has received various awards and grants for his research, including the Eugene K. Wolf Award from the American Musicological Society, and the Sachar Research Grant from the Mellon Foundation. 

Schwindt is actively engaged with professional societies and public events, including an invited talk on country music and class status for WGBH (PBS–Boston), as well as his work as a clinician for the Oxbridge Academic Program. He has also served the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society as a representative to the national council, as well as a member of the program committee, which he led for two years.

Schwindt received  his Ph.D. in Musicology from Brandeis University, an M.M. in Choral Conducting from the University of Arizona, and a B.M. in Vocal Performance from Wichita State University.