معرفی
Julie E. Cumming serves as Professor in the Department of Music at McGill University's Schulich School of Music, currently on sabbatical for the 2024-2025 academic year. Her distinguished career at McGill began in 1992 following seven years at Wellesley College, with significant leadership roles including Interim Dean (2016-2017) and Associate Dean of Research and Administration (2011-2016).
- BA in Music and Medieval Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University (1980)
- MA in Musicology, University of California, Berkeley (1982)
- PhD in Musicology and Medieval Studies, University of California, Berkeley (1987)
A leading scholar in Medieval and Renaissance musicology, Professor Cumming's research encompasses polyphonic analysis, historical improvisation, music notation (1100-1600), and digital humanities applications. Her groundbreaking work includes re-examining madrigal origins through empirical evidence and mapping 16th-century musical transmission across cultures. She pioneered computational musicology through the ELVIS project, creating the first large-scale data-driven analysis of musical style.
Her recent publications demonstrate an innovative fusion of traditional musicological methods with cognitive science and big data approaches, particularly in analyzing compositional processes and musical cognition in Renaissance contexts. Current projects focus on distributed cognition in early modern performance practices and developing international metadata standards for musical sources through the LinkedMusic initiative.
Professor Cumming has received multiple prestigious teaching awards:
- Schulich School of Music Full-Time Teaching Award (2007)
- McGill’s David Thomson Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Supervision (2015)
- Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools Teaching Award, doctoral level (2017)
She has supervised over 20 PhD dissertations on diverse topics including Renaissance counterpoint treatises, music and plague, and espionage in Elizabethan England, with former students now holding faculty positions at University of Toronto, University of Aberdeen, and Brandeis University. Her research funding includes:
- Principal Investigator: Digging into Data Challenge Grant "ELVIS" (2012-2014)
- Co-investigator: SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative "Making Publics" (2005-2010)
- Co-leader: SSHRC Partnership Grant "SIMSSA" (2014-2023)
- Co-investigator: SSHRC Partnership Grant "LinkedMusic"
Professor Cumming co-founded and leads the SIMSSA research team, an international consortium developing open-source tools for music score analysis and source linking, while directing the ELVIS project's continued development of vertical interval succession databases for Renaissance music analysis.
