Russell O’Rourke is a Lecturer in Music at Columbia. Since 2021, he is also a member of the Histories of Music, Mind, and Body research group at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics.
A historian of music theory and of the madrigal, Russell studies sixteenth-century Italian discourse about the persuasive power of music and language, especially within the writings of Gioseffo Zarlino and his acolytes. He is currently writing a book-length study of Cinquecento music psychology centered on four undertheorized affective-cognitive responses: emotion, predisposition, recognition, and awe. A secondary project examines pedagogies of solmization in eighteenth-century Brazil.
He is published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and has three entries forthcoming in Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Theory (eds. Christensen, Hu, Raz).
At Columbia, Russell teaches both Music Humanities, within the Core Curriculum, and, within the Department of Music, the first half of the Western music history survey for music majors. Previously, he founded and ran the historical notation study group Ars Nota for two years, from 2017 to 2019.
[Bio updated November 2025. Photo by Nova Benway.]
