Prof Julie E. Cumming

Julie E. Cumming is Associate Professor of Musicology and Associate Dean (Research and Administration) of the Schulich School of Music, McGill University.  She is a member of the Early Modern Conversions project (http://earlymodernconversions.com/), headed by Paul Yachnin (McGill, English); she is also co-leader (with Ichiro Fujinaga) of Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (https://simssa.ca/), a digital humanities project (both are partnership grants funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada).  She is the author of The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (1999); recent articles include “From Two-Part Framework to Movable Module,” in Medieval Music in Practice: Studies in Honor of Richard Crocker, ed. Judith Peraino (2013); “Renaissance Improvisation and Musicology,” Music Theory Online (2013); two articles co-authored with Peter Schubert: “Another Lesson from Lassus: Using Computers to Analyse Counterpoint” (Early Music, 2015), and “The Origins of Pervasive Imitation,” in The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin (2015).  Her research focuses on Renaissance polyphony in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, from many points of view: cultural context, prints and manuscripts, style change, and compositional process. She is also one of the leading musicologists working on ensemble improvisation in Renaissance polyphony. This has led to collaboration with Evelyn Tribble (also a member of the Early Modern Conversions project) on improvisation as a form of distributed cognition in music and theatre.