Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Paula Maust. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Paula, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

I co-direct the baroque chamber ensemble Musica Spira with my friend and colleague Grace Srinivasan. Our mission is to bring the underrepresented stories of early modern women musicians to life through thought-provoking programs that shed light on women’s multifaceted contributions to music history. Women have always been actively involved in creating, performing, teaching, and patronizing music, but their significant contributions have generally been written out of historical narratives. This has perpetuated the false narratives that either women were not writing Western classical music before the twentieth century or that the music. This could not be further from the truth! In fact, historical women were active agents in the development of nearly every major historical genre of Western classical music. In addition to composing music, they were also often highly paid performers who brought the repertoire written by their now more famous and canonical male contemporaries to life. Handel’s operas and oratorios, for example, surely would not have become the iconic and famous works that they were and still remain today if the music had not been performed by talented sopranos. Women also worked behind the scenes as copyists, engravers, and teachers of music, and wealthy aristocratic women were often important musical patrons. As an ensemble, we create concert programs that highlight the accomplishments of groundbreaking historical women musicians.

Paula, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I describe myself as a performer, scholar, and educator, because my work simultaneously encompasses all of those roles. In my work as a music theory professor at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University, as the co-director of Musica Spira, and as a researcher, I focus on fusing creative practice and scholarship to amplify underrepresented voices. I am the creator of Expanding the Music Theory Canon (www.expandingthemusictheorycanon.com), an open-source collection of music theory examples by historical women and/or people of color that is being used around the world. I developed this resource and made it available to the world because I was disheartened by the absence of composer diversity in music theory textbooks. My students in front of me in the classroom reflected a beautiful sea of diversity, yet the pedagogical resources in the field were devoid of gender and racial diversity, particularly for historical composers. The site quickly had more than 30,000 users in 61 countries, and I recently released some of the contents of the site as a print anthology with SUNY Press. At Peabody, one of the courses I teach is a graduate seminar focused on Expanding the Music Theory Canon, and I regularly incorporate examples from the site and book into all of my courses. With Musica Spira, we program repertoire that specifically highlights women’s musical contributions to Western Classical Music. We have done programs that highlight women composers in 17th-century Italian convents, the concerto delle donne (the first paid professional women musicians in Italy), and the reception history of women on the early modern stage. We craft a narrative that we share with the audience as each concert unfolds. This season we are very excited to be preparing our first recording, a CD of works that have never been recorded before by Isabella Leonarda and Maria Perucona. These women lived and worked in the same Ursuline convent in Novara, Italy, and their music is incredible! We love working with historic manuscripts and making editorial decisions about what the notes, rhythms, and text is for these works when the original sources are unclear. It is exhilarating to bring these works to life again, likely for the first time since their seventeenth-century premieres!
I am also an early modern area editor for the women, gender, and sexuality revision of Grove Music Online, which is the most significant English-language reference resource for the field of music. In that role, I work with a team of two other amazing scholars to identify articles about women in the encyclopedia that need to be revised and articles that are missing for women active between 1600 and 1800. I am also doing archival research and working on some articles about Elizabeth Turner, an 18th-century soprano and composer whose harpsichord works I have performed in recital and plan to record.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

My co-director for Musica Spira is my friend and colleague Grace Srinivasan. We met in graduate school while we were both students at the Peabody Conservatory. Grace is a soprano, and she asked me to play the harpsichord for her graduate recital. We discovered during the process of preparing for her recital that we worked well together and shared similar goals and ideas for concert programming. We also had a shared passion of using our creative work to breathe life into the stories historical women musicians. Musica Spira was the result!

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

It is a privilege to get to spend such a high percentage of my time each day/week/month/year working on projects that feel meaningful to me and that have resonated with others as well. I feel like I spent many years of my life while I was in school and then working in the years immediately following school where I was spending about 80% of my time doing things that I did not love and 20% doing things I loved. With persistence, a lot of luck, and patience, I have managed to create a life for myself where I get to spend about 90% of my time doing things I love and 10% doing things I do not love. I am immensely grateful for that privilege, and I think it is one of the best parts of being an artist and creative. We do have a lot of choices in how we structure and create the fabric of our own lives.

Contact Info:

• Website: paulamaust.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pmaust1/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paula.maust
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paula-maust-a5106879/
• Other: musicaspira.com expandingthemusictheorycanon.com

Image Credits
Corbin Phillips