Faculty in the Department of Music at Columbia University

Ellie Hisama came to Columbia in 2006, having previously taught at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where she was Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music; she was also on the faculty of the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is Professor of Music and Vice Chair of the Department, and a member of the Theory and Historical Musicology areas. 

Author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (2001) and co-editor of Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies (2005) and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (2007), she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, post-tonal theory, American music, popular music, gender and feminist studies, critical studies of music and race, and the social and political roles of music. Her work has been published in the journals Popular Music, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Musicology, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and in the edited volumes Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945; Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music; Locating East Asia in Western Art Music; Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies; and Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds. She has received major fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation/Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and was an Associate at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College.  Most recently, she is the recipient of a Tsunoda Senior Fellowship at Waseda University in Tokyo for residency in 2010. She has served as an evaluator for the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Musicological Society. She is an Associate Editor of Perspectives of New Music and is Founding Editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music published by Cambridge University Press, http://journals.cambridge.org/jsam. Two articles she edited for JSAM have won major awards: Christopher Reynolds's article "Porgy and Bess: 'An American Wozzeck'," published in JSAM 1/1 (February 2007), won two awards--the American Musicological Society's H. Colin Slim Award in 2008 for "a musicological article of exceptional merit" by a senior scholar and the 2009 Kurt Weill Prize for "outstanding scholarship on music theater since 1900"--and Laurie Stras's article "White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the Boswell Sisters," published in JSAM 1/2 (May 2007) won an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award in the Pop Articles category in 2008.

She has served on the Society for Music Theory's Program Committee, Committee on the Status of Women, and Diversity Committee and on the AMS's Program Committee, and has presented papers at meetings of the Society for Music Theory, American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for American Music, Feminist Theory and Music, International Society for the Study of Popular Music, Modernist Studies Association, and National Women's Studies Association. She is on the advisory boards of Tracking Pop, a new popular music book series published by the University of Michigan Press, and of the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and is also on the editorial boards of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture; the Journal of Musicology; and Echo: a music-centered journal. She is a member of the AMS's Publications Committee and of the Advisory Board of the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music. She has co-organized several major conferences, including Ruth Crawford Seeger: Modernity, Tradition, and the Making of American Music (2001), Local Music/Global Connections: New York City at the Millennium (2001), and Feminist Theory and Music 8 (2005). She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia. In 2008-9, she was Visiting Professor of Music at Harvard University.  In summer 2009, she was an invited participant at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in the seminar Postcolonial Music Studies.

Fred Lerdahl taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, at Columbia from 1979-85, and subsequently at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before returning to Columbia in 1991.

He has received the Koussevitzky Composition Prize (1966), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974-75), two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1971, 1988), an NEH Fellowship (1991), and other awards, and many commissions for compositions.

Fabien Lévy came to Columbia University in the fall of 2006. He previously taught orchestration to composition students at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns-Eisler in Berlin (Germany), and computer music at the Sorbonne University in Paris (France). He also worked at the IRCAM Institute, first in the research department, then as pedagogical advisor.

Fabien Lévy studied composition with Gérard Grisey at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, as well as analysis with Michael Levinas, ethnomusicology with Gilles Leothaud and orchestration with Marc-André Dalbavie. He received a Ph.D. in musicology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and a master's in mathematical economics (ENSAE & ENS Ulm).

His works, published until 2007 by Billaudot and now by Ricordi Germany, have been performed across Europe, Asia, Africa and America by ensembles and soloists including L'Itinéraire, the London Sinfonietta, the Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. His music has received several awards, including a 2001 DAAD Artist-in-Residence Program Berlin, a 2002 Rostrum of Unesco, the 2003 French Rom prize in the Villa Medici, and the 2004 Siemens Prize for composers.

John Szwed is an anthropologist and jazz scholar, whose publications range from anthropological studies of Newfoundland and the West Indies to record liner notes and jazz journalism. Among other books, he has published Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (1997), Jazz 101 (2000), and So What: The Life of Miles Davis (2002). Doctor Jazz, a book included with the CD set, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, was awarded a Grammy in 2005.

Before he joined Columbia, Szwed taught Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies for many years at Yale University, and also received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. He is President of the non-profit music production company Brilliant Corners, which is based in New York City.