Melanie Gudesblatt

Melanie Gudesblatt is a Lecturer in Music History and Literature at the San Francisco Conservatory, having received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. Before coming to Berkeley, she earned an M.Mus. from King’s College London (2012) and a B.A. in Music from Cornell University (2009). Her research examines the relationship between vocal sound and metaphorical conceptions of voice around 1900, with special focus on how Euro-American listening habits shaped the processes by which more abstract notions of voice were accorded political and social capital. In her dissertation, “Between Noise and Song: The Contested Voice in Opera after Wagner,” she explored how Austro-German operagoers responded to stylistic shifts in late nineteenth-century vocal writing, and described new habits of interpretation whereby operatic voices and vocal sounds could be made to serve a staggering variety of political, cultural, and scientific projects. She recently received the American Musicological Society’s inaugural Holmes/D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies in support of this project.