Jessica Payette - Oakland University Music

Jessica Payette
Assistant Professor of Musicology

Contact
payette@oakland.edu
(248) 370-3148

Jessica Payette is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Oakland University. She received her Ph.D. in musicology and humanities from Stanford University in 2008. Professor Payette teaches segments of the undergraduate music history survey, the introductory graduate research course, graduate music history seminars, and “Critical Theory Methodologies in the Global Arts,” a required course for the world music minor that investigates how artists and human rights activists engage with ideas presented in seminal critical theory texts.

Professor Payette is a specialist in twentieth-century avant-garde music. Her work examines the pioneering stylistic features and legacy of Arnold Schoenberg’s Expressionistic vocal works. Publications stemming from her dissertation research include a book chapter on the generic significance of monodrama in Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, edited by Sarah Hibberd (Ashgate, 2011), and a forthcoming chapter on Pierre Boulez’s allegiance to Schoenberg’s novel temporal configurations and construction of multi-perspectival compositional frameworks in Boulez Studies, edited by Edward Campbell and Peter O’Hagan. Her recent research details how postwar ballet choreographers increasingly embraced electronic and experimental music in pieces that portray debates in modern thought or controversial social issues.

In 2009 Professor Payette received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to attend the summer seminar entitled “German Exile Culture in California,” a six-week workshop led by Professor Russell Berman. Her work has also been generously supported by the Oakland University Research Council, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Professor Payette has presented papers nationally and internationally at conferences, including the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the Congress on Research in Dance, the Opera After Freud conference, and the first international conference on the music of Hanns Eisler at the University of London. Other articles and reviews appear in Women and Music, Notes, and Amerigrove, the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. Professor Payette will begin serving a two-year term on the AMS Committee on Women and Gender in 2013.