Lucy Turner

Dr. Lucy Turner is Lecturer in Discipline in the Department of Music at Columbia University, where she earned her PhD in Historical Musicology in 2022. Originally from North Carolina, she holds a Bachelor of Music degree in violin performance with a concentration in musicology from Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. At Vanderbilt, she completed an honors thesis entitled "Music in a Familiar Accent: Linguistic Rhythm as Nationalist Sentiment in Sibelius, Enescu, and Janáček." She also holds a Master of Music degree in violin performance from Boston University. Since 2018, Dr. Turner has taught Masterpieces of Western Music in the Core curriculum, where she enjoys introducing students to the historical, artistic, and cultural complexity surrounding Western art music. 

Dr. Turner's research focuses on Classical instrumental form and temporality, topic theory, manuscript studies, and the music of Beethoven, particularly aesthetics and meaning in the string quartets. Her dissertation, titled “Rethinking Beethoven’s Middle Style: Form, Time, and Disruption in the Chamber Works of 1806-15” was completed under the supervision of Prof. Elaine Sisman. She has presented at conferences in the United States and Europe, including “Untangling Fugato: Learned Style as Improvisatory Topic” at the 2021 meeting of the American Musicological Society. Her article “‘So Here I Am, in the Middle Way’: The Autograph of the ‘Harp’ Quartet and the Expressive Domain of Beethoven’s Second Maturity” was published in The New Beethoven: Evolution, Analysis, Interpretation (University of Rochester Press, 2020). Forthcoming work explores the “opus concept” in chamber music after the turn of the nineteenth century in Vienna and form and temporality in Beethoven’s “Archduke” trio.