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Research and Teaching Interests

Exoticism, nationalism, and music; music, gender, and class; cross-cultural musical experiences; music as a commodity and social practice; Hungarian Romani music; Viennese musical life; historical dance

Profile

Dr. Catherine Mayes specializes in the music and culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, with a strong focus on Viennese engagement with Eastern Europe and its music at that time. She has also published on intercultural resonances in Haydn’s opera Lo speziale, on the Schumanns’ educations and their intersection with class and gender, and on music history pedagogy. Her book Hungarian Dances and Musical Life in Eighteenth-Century Vienna is a social history of a unique facet of the city’s diversity, illuminating how it shaped everyday experiences, individual and collective identities, and boundaries of belonging from approximately 1750 to 1810, with particular attention to the mediating and intersecting effects of gender and class on cross-cultural encounters.

Catherine’s research and teaching have been funded and recognized by numerous grants and awards from the U.S. Department of Education, Cornell University, and the University of Utah. For her article “Eastern European National Music as Concept and Commodity at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” (February 2014), she won the Westrup Prize from Music & Letters (Oxford University Press) for “an article of particular distinction.” She was the 2018 recipient of the University of Utah College of Fine Arts Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Utah in 2012, Catherine taught at Ithaca College, Cornell University, and the University of Notre Dame.

Recent Courses Taught

• Music and National Identity (graduate seminar)
• Exoticism in Music (graduate seminar)
• Classical Music (undergraduate/graduate survey course)
• Music History Survey II: The Mid-18th through the Late 19th Centuries (undergraduate core course)

Selected Publications

Books

Hungarian Dances and Musical Life in Eighteenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025)

Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730–1830, ed. Emily H. Green and Catherine Mayes, Eastman Studies in Music no. 138 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017)

Articles and Book Chapters

“Music about Vienna and the Viennese in Classical, Folk, and Popular Traditions,” in Vienna: A Musical History, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press)

“Education,” in Clara and Robert Schumann in Context, ed. Joe Davies and Roe-Min Kok (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press)

“‘Salamelica’: New Thoughts on Volpino and His Aria in Act III of Lo speziale,” Eighteenth-Century Music 17/1 (March 2020): 73–85

“Exoticism,” in The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia, ed. Caryl Clark and Sarah Day-O’Connell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 116–118

“Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism,” in The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia, ed. Caryl Clark and Sarah Day-O’Connell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 236–237

“A Version of Guided Notetaking for Use in Music History Courses: Fostering Engagement and Achievement through Critical Thinking and Writing,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 8/2 (Spring 2018): 208–227

 “Introduction,” in Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730–1830, Eastman Studies in Music no. 138 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017), 1–10 (co-authored with Emily H. Green)

“In Vienna ‘Only Waltzes Get Printed’: The Decline and Transformation of the Contredanse Hongroise in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730–1830, Eastman Studies in Music no. 138 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017), 154–175

“Turkish and Hungarian-Gypsy Styles,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 214–237

“Eastern European National Music as Concept and Commodity at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Music & Letters 95/1 (February 2014): 70–91

“Reconsidering an Early Exoticism: Viennese Adaptations of Hungarian-Gypsy Music around 1800,” Eighteenth-Century Music 6/2 (September 2009): 161–181