Roberta Freund Schwartz
Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; M.A. University of Iowa
Roberta Freund Schwartz is the Director of the Musicology Division, and has taught at the University of Kansas since 2001. She holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, with specializations in the music of the Renaissance and African American music. Her areas of research interest include the early music of Spain, musical patronage, the history of recorded sound, transnational interpretations of African American music, the blues, and rock and roll. She is the author of How Britain Got the Blues: the Transmission and Reception of American Blues Styles to theBritish Isles (Ashgate, 2007), which won the 2008 Association of Recorded Sound Collections award for best historical writing on the blues. Schwartz is heavily involved in rock music pedagogy; she developed Reverb: A Digital Rock Anthology for the W. W. Norton textbook What’s That Sound? (W. W. Norton, 2005, 2007) and the instructor’s manual for Rock and Roll: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Centgage, 2006), and has contributed material to several other rock texts. Her work has appeared in a number of compilations and Festschrifts, and she has published articles on the Spanish melomane and composer Saint Francis of Borja; Spanish music manuscripts; the patronage of music by the Spanish nobility in the Renaissance; sexual euphemism in the blues; Iowan identity in The Music Man; British blues rock; and the role that British jazz critics played in popularizing African American music in England. Schwartz has also presented papers and lectures on various topics at major conferences in the United States, Spain, and England. She is currently working on a monograph about the Chicago or “hokum” blues of the 1930s. Schwartz is also an advocate for the preservation and care of early sound recordings; she was Director of the KU Archive of Recorded Sound from 2001-2005 and currently serves as the Archive’s advising director.
Selected Awards & Grants
2001
- A-R Editions Award, Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, Spring
2000-2001
- University of Illinois Dissertation Completion Fellowship
1998
- University of Illinois Foundation Research Grant
1997-1998
- Rotary International Fellowship
1997
- Presser Foundation Fellowship
1993
- An Incomplete Listing of Teaching Assistants ranked as Excellent by their Students, University of Illinois
- Rita Benton Award for Excellence in Musicology, 1993
- Undergraduate music performance scholarship, University of Iowa
Selected Publications
- From Criado to Canonization: Music in the Life of Saint Francis of Borja, Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman, ed. Barbara Haggh (Klincksieck, 2001), pp. 193-200, Borja, San Francisco de.
- Die Musik In Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopedie der Musik, (Bärenreiter Metzler, 2001), vol. 2, pp. 325-328.
- En busca de la cultura cortesana: investigaciones del mecenazgo musical de las cortes nobiliarias del Renacimiento, Signo: Revista de Historia de la Cultura Escrita 5 (1998), pp. 127-132.
- Sevilla 5-5-20, Tarazona 2/3, y los fuentes manuscritos del siglo XVI: una reconsideración de conexiones, proceedings of the Coloquio Internacional: Fuentes musicales en la Península Ibérica (ca. 1250-1550), Lleida, 1996 (Lleida: Ediciones de la Universitat de Lleida, 2001), pp. 203-218.
Selected Papers Read
2003
- The Greatest Miracle of San Blas: A Convent as Noble Chapel in Early Modern Spain, at the national meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, March 27, 2003
2002
- To Get My Hambone Boiled: Food as Sexual Euphemism in the Blues, Hall Center for the Humanities, 2002 Spring Faculty Colloquium, February 21, 2002
2001
- Spain is Different: Music in the Courts of the Spanish Nobility in the Renaissance, at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, Atlanta, November 18, 2001
- En busca de liberalidad: Modalities of Music Patronage of the Spanish Nobility, 1470-1640, at the spring meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, March 25, 2001
- In search of liberalidad: Music, musicians and patronal strategies of the Dukes of Alba, 1470-1635, at the musicology colloquium of the University of Iowa, February 9, 2001
1997
- Manuscript Sources of Spanish Renaissance Music: A Reconsideration of Connections, at the conference New Studies in Spanish Music, University of Illinois, January 24-25, 1997
1996
- Sevilla 5-5-20, Tarazona 2/3, y los fuentes manuscritos del siglo XVI: una reconsideración de conexiones, at the international colloquium Fuentes musicales en la Península Ibérica (ca. 1250-ca. 1550), Lleida , Spain April 1996