Kathryn Libin
Associate Professor (Music History and Theory)
Office: Skinner Hall 307
Phone: (845) 437-7330
Box: 232
Contact Kathryn Libin
Ph.D., M.A., New York University; B.M., Oberlin Conservatory.
A musicologist and keyboardist, Ms. Libin specializes in music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly Mozart, and the history and performance practice of early keyboard instruments. Her forthcoming book, Instruments and Idiom in Mozart’s Keyboard Concertos, will be published by Indiana University Press in its series Publications of the Early Music Institute. She has completed a catalogue of Mozart sources in the Roudnice Lobkowicz Library near Prague, and is currently working on a biography of the musical patron Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowitz.
Ms. Libin also studies intersections between music and literature in early Romanticism, with special emphasis on musical issues and implications in the writings of Austen, Burney, Scott, and Goethe. Her article on “Music and Literature” appears in The Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era. She has given numerous presentations at annual meetings of the Jane Austen Society of North America, and served as musical director for JASNA’s 25th anniversary meeting in England in 2003, which included planning a Jane Austen memorial evensong service at Winchester Cathedral. Her most recent article on music in Austen’s work, “Lifting the Heart to Rapture: Harmony, Nature, and the Unmusical Fanny Price,” appeared in the 2007 volume of Persuasions.
Ms. Libin served two terms as President of the American Musical Instrument Society (2003-07), and is now President of the Mozart Society of America. She is editor of Early Keyboard Journal, and serves on the editorial board of the AMIS Journal. She has been program annotator for the Concerts & Lectures series at The Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1989, and her program notes appear regularly in Stagebill for the Mostly Mozart Festival and Great Performers at Lincoln Center, as well as for the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College.