Biography

Evan MacCarthy completed his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard in 2010 with a dissertation on music and intellectual life in fifteenth-century Ferrara. From 2010 to 2012, he was the Harvard College Fellow in the Department of Music at Harvard, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in music history. He received his BA in classics and music from the College of the Holy Cross. He has also served on the music faculties of MIT and Boston University, and regularly sang as bass soloist with the Schola Cantorum of the College of the Holy Cross.

Project Summary

His project for the fellowship year concerns the place of music in the different spheres of humanistic and scholastic learning at Italian courts, cathedrals, and universities in the fifteenth century. This study will offer a clearer perspective of how and why the surviving sources of Italian music theory were written, studied, and circulated, as well as new insight into the contemporary readers of these texts be they learned theorists, young students, clerics in training, or courtly dilettantes.