Anne Levitsky

Anne Adele Levitsky is a scholar and performer of medieval vernacular song, in particular troubadour lyric poetry, and its connections to the larger cultural milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She is a graduate of Stanford University and earned her PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University in May 2018. At present, she is Lecturer in Music at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and has taught previously at Columbia, Dixie State University, and Stony Brook University. As an academic, she is interested in medieval vernacular song, poetry, and narrative literature, and her monograph The Natural World of Troubadour Song: Materiality, Craft, Philosophy is under contract with Liverpool University Press for their series Exeter Studies in Medieval Culture. It reads troubadour lyric poetry in the context of philosophical, theological, and medical writings available in the twelfth century, and uses this analytical frame to employ new methods for the analysis of medieval monophonic song. Her work also appears in Mediaevalia, Current Musicology, The Medieval Review, and in the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Music (in a chapter co-authored with Susan Boynton). Dr. Levitsky is also interested in the presence and role of medievalisms in popular music, especially in heavy metal. She supplements this academic interest in vernacular song with an active performance career, and has studied and performed lyric poetry with the Narbonne-based Troubadours Art Ensemble, and recorded troubadour and trouvère songs both with the group and as a soloist. Dr. Levitsky performs regularly in the Brisbane area with The Australian Voices. In addition, she performs with ensemble Fractio Modi (of which she is a founding member). Past performances include a June 2013 performance with the Rolling Stones in Washington, DC, tours to Germany with NYC-based chamber ensemble GHOSTLIGHT Chorus, and concerts of monophony and polyphony from the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries on Columbia's Music at St. Paul's concert series. Dr. Levitsky is also the founding director of the UQ School of Music's Early Music Ensemble.