Mauro Calcagno

Mauro Calcagno is a musicologist and cultural theorist. He received his Ph.D. in Music from Yale University, taught at Harvard from 2000 to 2008, and is currently Associate Professor of the History and Theory of Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Calcagno’s work focuses on the madrigal, early opera, performance studies, digital humanities, and the theory and aesthetics of music. Publications include, besides the book From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self, an article on Monteverdi's operas in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and various essays on Italian Baroque opera and the madrigal. His essay on the aesthetics of voice in seventeenth-century music, published in the Journal of Musicology, received the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society, which he served as President of the New England Chapter.

At Harvard, Calcagno founded the Opera Seminar at the Humanities Center, and later at Stony Brook he started the Opera Studies and Performance program--both initiatives currently flourishing. His edition of Cavalli's opera Eliogabalo has been used for performances in Bruxelles, Dortmund, Stony Brook, and New York City.

In the occasion of this last production (by Gotham Chamber Opera), the New York Times and The New Yorker featured articles that discussed Calcagno's hypothesis that the opera was censored: click here;

This website includes news and materials about three scholarly projects (past and current):

1. The book From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self, published by University of California Press in 2012, with links to useful resources (companion webpage, click on the title on the sidebar).

2. The Marenzio Project, including a forthcoming volume of essays and a new online digital edition of Luca Marenzio's secular works, which was recently awarded a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (a federal agency in the U.S.A.)

3. A second book in progress devoted to the historiographical and conceptual issues concerning today’s stagings of Baroque operas, from Monteverdi to Handel.