Faculty: Isabelle Emerson
Isabelle Emerson, Chair of Music, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is an associate professor of music history. She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musicology.
Professor Emerson holds a B.A. from Barnard College where she majored in music, studied piano with Josef Raieff at the Juilliard School, and studied organ with Searle Wright at Columbia University. In 1960 Emerson was awarded a Fulbright grant to study organ with Helmut Walcha at the Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. In addition to a Master's degree in Sacred Music from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Columbia University. From 1969 to 1977 she served as University Organist and Director of Music at St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University.
In addition to performing as organist, harpsichordist, and pianist, Isabelle Emerson has presented papers for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Leipzig Gewandhaus International Symposium on Richard Strauss, the International Musicological Society, and the Mozart Bicentennial Congress in Salzburg. Her work has been published in Current Musicology, Mozart Jahrbuch, Musical Quarterly, Notes, and The Piano Quarterly. Twentieth-Century American Music for the Dance, a bibliography compiled and edited by Emerson, was published in August 1996 by Greenwood Press. She is currently working on a second book for Greenwood, 500 Years of Women Singers, and is preparing with the composer Alice Shields a biography of the electronic music pioneer Vladimir Ussachevsky. She coordinates and directs a symposium each summer for the Santa Fe Opera.
In the fall of 1996 Dr. Emerson founded the Mozart Society of America, which she has served since then as president. The Society's two hundred members include American and European musicologists as well as many scholars from other disciplines and individuals who simply have a passionate interest in the music of Mozart. The biannual Newsletter is subscribed to by the music libraries of Columbia University, Harvard University, the Preussischer Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Gesellschaft für Musikfreunde in Vienna, Bar Ilan University in Israel, and many other institutions in the United States and Europe.