Recent Activity

University Talks & Teaching

External doctoral dissertation committee member, Shendandoah Conservatory, Winchester, VA.

Guest Lecture: “Fanny Hensel” in R. Larry Todd graduate seminar, “Women in Music.” Duke University, Durham, NC, October 10, 2023.

Guest Lecture: “Fanny Hensel” in Laurie McManus undergraduate seminar “Women in Music.” Shendandoah Conservatory, Winchester, VA, March 24, 2023.

Guest Lecture: “Fanny Mendelssohn’s ‘Easter Sonata’” in Allen Shawn undergraduate seminar, “Seven Composers.” Bennington College, Bennington, VT, March 6, 2023.

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music, Shendandoah Conservatory (Fall Semester 2022), Graduate Seminar: “Sound, Silence, and Embodiment: Musical Monuments.”

Course Description: In this course, we will explore monumentality and monuments in music, from canon formation and genre to actual monuments built to honor a specific composer. Each student will select a monument to anchor their learning experience throughout the semester, and will explore the composer, their life and works, and reception history (Sound), and ultimately why a monument (or statue, historical home, street name, plaza name, concert hall, etc) was created to honor them (Embodiment). We will interrogate the socio-political contexts that surrounded lives and works of the composers, the genesis of their monuments, any protests or resistance to the legacies each represents, the symbolism of the monument design, and musical festivities that accompanied unveilings. And Silence: who is missing from the town squares and concert programs, and why? We will seek out those composers and musicians who have been excluded by reason of gender, race, sexuality, religion, national origin and more to learn about their lives and works and the social contexts that shut them out. We will engage in thought experiments about what monuments to these composers would look like, where they would be, and how they would interact with their communities.

Discussant

Q&A, North American Premiere of Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn (Mercury Studios, 2023). At DOCNYC Film Festival, November 13 and 14, 2023. LINK

Articles & Essays

Angela Mace Christian (2022). “The Easter Sonata of Fanny Mendelssohn (1828),” Journal of Musicological Research, 41:3, 182-209. LINK

Angela Mace Christian. “Sibling Love and the Daemonic: Contradictions in the Relationship between Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn,” in Rethinking Mendelssohn, ed. Benedict Taylor, 140-57. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2020). LINK

On the personal relationship between Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn, in Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context (Cambridge Composers in Context Series), ed. Benedict Taylor and Thomas Schmidt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

On Fanny Hensel’s Musical Salon, in A History of Women and Musical Salons, ed. Jacqueline Avila and Rebecca Cypess. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in preparation.

Large Scale Projects & Collaborations

Co-author, with R. Larry Todd, Fanny Hensel: A Life Chronicle. In progress.

Paula Rios, piano, When in the Silence of the Soul, CD featuring Fanny Hensel’s “Easter Sonata” and a selection of her unpublished piano works. Eudora, 2023. LINK

FANNY: The Other Mendelssohn. Film documentary, dir. Sheila Hayman. Mercury Studios, 2023. LINK

Reviews

Review. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Edited by Malcolm Bruno and Caroline Ritchie Bärenreiter-Verlag 2023. BA11308. Score € 98.–, Piano Reduction/Vocal Score (BA11308-90) € 38.95, performance material on hire. Nineteenth-Century Music Review. In preparation.

Angela Mace Christian (2022). Review. “The Songs of Fanny Hensel,” Journal of Musicological Research, 41:1, 50-53. LINK

Christian, A. (2022). Review. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Lobgesang: Eine Symphonie-Kantate nach Worten der Heiligen Schrift (Hymn of Praise: A Symphony-Cantata after Texts from the Holy Scripture), MWV A 18 / Op. 52. Bärenreiter Urtext, 2020. xxxvii 304 pp. Introduction, Tables, 3 facsimiles, Critical Report. Edited by John Michael Cooper. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 1-5. LINK