Amy Zigler
Education
PhD, Music History and Literature, University of Florida
MM, Piano Performance, Belmont University
BM, Piano Performance, University of Alabama (magna cum laude)
Biography
Dr. Amy E. Zigler is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research specializes in music of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on the cultural study of chamber music, the social history of music in Germany and Great Britain, and the study of gender and sexuality in music. Her recent research centers on socio-cultural implications of, and (auto)biographical narratives in, the music of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on the life and music of Dame Ethel Smyth.
Dr. Zigler has presented papers internationally, nationally, and regionally, including the 2023 Operatic Feminisms symposium at Columbia University; the 2021 Third International Women’s Work in Music conference at Bangor University in Wales; the 2020 Musical Women in Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century conference at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England; the 2018 Centennial Reflections on Women’s Suffrage and the Art conference at the University of Surrey, England; the 2016 Nineteenth-Century Programme Music Symposium in Lucca, Italy; and multiple presentations at the North American British Music Studies Association bi-annual conferences. She co-chaired with Dr. Hannah Millington the international symposium, Dame Ethel Smyth: Connections, Culture Context, held at Dublin City University in the summer of 2024. Her publications include forthcoming chapters with Cambridge University Press and Boydell & Brewer Press; published chapters in the collections Nineteenth-Century Programme Music and Women Composers in New Perspectives, 1800-1950: Genres, Contexts and Repertoires; articles for The Opera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music; and the biographical liner notes for the Grammy-award winning recording of Ethel Smyth’s The Prison. She has presented her research throughout the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy. Her research has been supported by the Music & Letters Trust and the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities.
Zigler is currently a member of the Royal Musical Association, the American Musicological Society, the North American British Music Studies Association, and the International Alliance for Women in Music. Dr. Zigler served on the American Musicological Society Committee on Women and Gender and was a board member for musicology in the College Music Society Mid-Atlantic chapter.
In addition to teaching and research, Dr. Zigler continues to perform as a soloist and as a founding member of the Winnfield Quartet.
Subjects Taught
- Music research and writing
- Gender and sexuality in music
- 19th– and 20th-century music
- Piano literature
Scholarly Creative/Research Activity
“‘Perhaps what men call a sin…’: An examination of Ethel Smyth’s The Prison,” in Women Composers in New Perspectives, 1800-1950: Genres, Contexts and Repertoires, edited by Mariateresa Storino and Susan Wollenberg, Brepols, 2023 (Speculum Musicae, 49).
Foreword to a critical edition of Ethel Smyth’s Overture to The Wreckers, published through the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music and the Free Library of Philadelphia, Gary Galván, curator and editor, 2023.
Review of Ethel Smyth’s Serenade in D major for Orchestra, edited by John L. Snyder (A-R Editions, 2021), in Nineteenth-Century Music Review (published online 6 September 2022).
“’What a Splendid Chance Missed!’: Dame Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald at the Met,” The Opera Journal 54, no. 2 (December 2021): 109-163.
“Note on the composer,” liner notes for Ethel Smyth, The Prison, James Blachly, Dashon Burton, Sarah Brailey, Chandos Records, CHAN 5279, 2020.
“‘You and I Will Be Like the Monk Dante Meets in Hell’: Literary References and Autobiography in Ethel Smyth’s Sonata in A Minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 7 (1887)”, in Nineteenth-Century Programme Music: Creation, Negotiations, Reception, edited by Jonathan Kregor, Brepols, 2018 (Speculum Musicae, 32).
Review of Sheila Jordan: Portrait of a Jazz Child, by Ellen Johnson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), in Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2015, ed. by Eve Meyer (Wynnewood, PA.: The Alliance, 1995-).
Review of ‘Rock On’: Women, Ageing, and Popular Music, ed. By Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner (Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013), in Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, Vol. 19, No. 2, ed. by Eve Meyer (Wynnewood, PA.: The Alliance, 1995-).
“Four Romantic Chamber Works by Ethel Smyth (1858-1944),” Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, Vol. 14, no. 1 (2008), ed. by Eve Meyer (Wynnewood, PA.: The Alliance, 1995-).