Elaine Rochelle Sisman

(1952-01-20) January 20, 1952

American

Princeton University
Harvard University

Musicology

University of Michigan
Columbia University

Education[edit]

Sisman studied piano at the Juilliard pre-college division. She graduated from Cornell University in 1972, studying with Malcolm Bilson and received her doctorate in music history at Princeton University in 1978.[1]

Career[edit]

Sisman has taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University, as well as Columbia University where she currently teaches, having joined the faculty in 1982.[2] Sisman served for six years as chair of Columbia's Department of Music (1999–2005).[3] She serves on the board of directors of the Joseph Haydn-Institut in Cologne, the Akademie für Mozartforschung in Salzburg, and the American Brahms Society, and is an editor of Beethoven Forum and associate editor of The Musical Quarterly and 19th-Century Music. She was President of the American Musicological Society in 2005–06.[4]


Sisman's work has been highly regarded. Reviewing Haydn and the Classical Variation, Laszlo Somfai wrote, "Elaine Sisman's excellent book will be a major inspiration for younger scholars and for the vast majority of readers in and outside English-speaking countries."[5]

Awards[edit]

Sisman has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities[2] and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1983 she received the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society for best article by a younger scholar. Columbia has honored her with its Great Teacher Award in 1992 and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum in 2000. In 2014 Sisman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

ed. Haydn and His World (Princeton: , 1997)[6]

Princeton University Press

Mozart: The "Jupiter" Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551 (Cambridge: , 1993)

Cambridge University Press

Haydn and the Classical Variation (Cambridge: , 1993)

Harvard University Press

"After the Heroic Style: Fantasia and Beethoven's 'Characteristic' Sonatas of 1809," Beethoven Forum 6 (1997)

"Genre, Gesture, and Meaning in Mozart's 'Prague Symphony,'" in Mozart Studies 2 (Oxford: , 1997)

Oxford University Press

"Pathos and Pathetique: Rhetorical Stance in Beethoven's Piano Sonata in C minor, Op.13," Beethoven Forum 3 (1994)

"Brahms and the Variation Canon," 14 (1990), 132-53

19th-Century Music

"Haydn's Theater Symphonies," 43 (1990)

Journal of the American Musicological Society

"Small and Expanded Forms: Koch's Model and Haydn's Music," 68 (1982)

The Musical Quarterly

Autobiographical sketch (Haydn)

Double variation

Women in musicology