Alison Maggart

Alison Maggart is a musicologist, whose research focuses on U.S. 20th- and 21st-century music, culture, and identity. Her work, published in The Journal of the American Musicological Society, Contemporary Music Review, Perspectives of New Music, and Currently Musicology, explores intersections between music/sound, science, and literature/poetry; technoscientific imaginaries; esotericism; environmental ethics; and posthumanism in ultramodern, serial, New Age, and experimental aesthetics.

She has also presented at conferences on multisensory listening and synchronous fireflies; Milton Babbitt, baseball, and postwar nostalgia; intertextuality in serial music; new materials from the Piatigorsky archives (her paper, “A Newly Discovered Cadenza by Richard Strauss” won the 2016 AMS Ingolf Dahl Award); opera in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign; and time travel in “sound baths” at the Integration. In 2020–21 she was an invited participant in a joint USC/UCLA  study group, devoted to sound in sacred spaces. As a public musicologist, she has worked for the Piatigorsky Archives, the Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera, and the LA Phil.

After graduating from Middlebury College with a specialization in composition, she worked as an orchestrator/transcriber for Bollywood composer A.R. Rahman, in India. In 2017, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, where she was named the Outstanding Doctoral Student of the Thornton School. Her dissertation, “Referential Play in ‘Serious’ Music,” which theorizes the role that borrowing and quotation play in Babbitt’s aesthetics and construction of American-Jewish identity, was awarded the Musicology Department and Pi Kappa Lambda Awards.

Recently, Maggart has become increasingly interested in sound baths; popular and new materialist philosophies of vibration; music that shares postwar concerns in space, time, and the cosmos; and contemporary experimental works that on feminist and posthuman topics.