Sarah Eyerly, Music History
Sarah Eyerly, Assistant Professor of Music History, holds a M.A.
and Ph.D. in musicology and criticism from the University of
California, Davis, and a M.M. in historical performance practices
from the Mannes College of Music. As a Fulbright Fellow to the
Netherlands, she studied historical performance practices,
including baroque rhetoric, gesture, and ornamentation at the Royal
Conservatory, The Hague. Her research (supported by the American
Musicological Society, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation, the Consortium for Women and Research, and competitive
fellowships from the University of California) explores the close
relationship between the art of memory, literacy, and
improvisation, as represented by archival records from the
eighteenth-century German and American utopian communes of the
Moravian church.
She is currently working on a book manuscript, Utopia
Improvised: the Heavenly Lotteries of the Moravian Church,
which details the literate practice of Moravian improvisers, and
incorporates recent research in neurophysiology and neuropsychology
linking the patterns and information ordering utilized by
improvisers to structural patterning in the human brain. Her
chapter on memory and improvisation will be published in 2009 by
the Lehigh University Press in an edited volume on educational
traditions in early America, and she will chair a session titled
Improvisation in the Eighteenth Century on behalf of the
Society for Eighteenth-Century Music at the national meeting of the
American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies in March, 2010. She
is currently writing articles on the sonic worlds of
eighteenth-century religious utopias, and the pedagogical link
between memory and music in the educational curricula of the
Jansenist academies of Port-Royal and Moravian schools in Germany
and the colonies. Her research interests also include the folk
music of the bituminous mining communities of the Appalachians, and
the music of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirate utopias
of Morocco and the North African coast.
She has presented papers at the national meetings of the
American Musicological Society and the American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, the annual meeting of the International
Musicological Society, and has been invited to speak at the
Newberry Library, Moravian College, the University of California,
Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California. She has
previously taught at UCLA and the University of Southern
California, and has been appointed as a visiting scholar with
UCLA's Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and
the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Courses taught:
Undergraduate:
- Music History & Literature: 1850 to Present
- Music History & Literature: 1680 to 1850
- Music History & Literature: Antiquity, Middle Ages, and
Renaissance
- History and Analysis of Music: The Eighteenth Century
- History of Rock and Roll
- Music and Gender
- History of Opera: Romantic Period
- The Art SongWorld Music
- Performance Studies
- History of American Music
- Introduction to Music Theory
- Keyboard Methods
- Early Music Ensemble
Graduate:
- Introduction to Graduate Study
- Research in Music
- Improvisation in the Eighteenth Century
(317) 940-9256
seyerly@butler.edu